We remember L.J. Hortin as a pioneer of today’s JMC department
By Bob Valentine
L. J. Hortin played a large part in bringing Kentucky Dam and the boon it has been for west Kentucky. He led the effort to have Nathan B. Stubblefield recognized as an important inventor. In his spare time, he was an educational legend.
Born in Albion, Ill., in 1904, he attended McKendree College in Illinois. As a journalist he wrote for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Associated Press, United Press International, and others.
He began teaching journalism in 1928 at Murray State Normal School, and doubled as the debate coach. He started the “College News,” and from 1934 to 1938 he was Manager of the Murray Chamber of Commerce where he promoted Murray as the “Birthplace of Radio,” to honor Nathan B. Stubblefield, the Murray inventor of wireless telephony.
While teaching, from 1928 until 1938 he guided the Lower Tennessee Valley Association, a citizens’ group supporting the Tennessee Valley Authority and its plans to build a dam on the Tennessee River. His journalistic experience guided the political effort to bring the site to west Kentucky and his service as President and Executive Secretary of LTVA ended only when dam construction began near Gilbertsville on May 1, 1938.
He became Director of the Journalism program at Ohio University in 1947. His influence and proficiency as a teacher and administrator made him a natural for OU, which sought to establish a school of national prominence. It is now, by some estimates, one of the five largest in the country.
In 1967 he returned to Murray State as the chairman of Journalism, a post he held until retirement in 1974. He moved Journalism from a minor to a major field, created a Masters’ program, and saw his first MA graduate receive a doctorate from Ohio University, and then succeed him as chair of the new Department of Journalism and Radio/TV.
The Kentucky Press Hall of Fame honored him in the first class of inductees in 1981. Both McKendree College and Murray State University bestowed honorary doctoral degrees, and Murray State named him a Distinguished Alumnus.
His students include three Pulitzer Prize winners, like famed publisher John Mack Carter. Distinguished historian, Forrest Pogue, was the first student editor of The College News, and long-time Calloway County Executive Robert O. Miller and Paducah Attorney Henry Whitlow were on his debate team. Many of his news staffers became prominent journalists in their own right, and several became teachers of journalism. His successor, Dr. Robert H. McGaughey, was one of them.
Some of his former students will be reading this piece in the JMC Journal this spring. They will recall that students and faculty at MSU referred to L. J. Hortin with the affectionate nickname given to tough newspaper editors: “The Chief.”
That is putting it mildly.
