12. Joe Mitchell Chapple

Joseph “Joe” Mitchell Chapple (1867 – 1950) was a newspaper and magazine publisher and editor, author, world traveler, and lecturer in the vein of his contemporaries Mark Twain and William Jennings Bryan. He was born in La Porte City, Iowa, to a country merchant. Chapple began his career as a “printer’s devil” at nine and by sixteen (after a short stint attending Cornell College) became the editor of a Grand Rapids, North Dakota, newspaper. He married Annie F. Ryder in 1886 and later worked in North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Chicago before becoming the publisher of a monthly journal, The Bostonian, in 1897. Chapple renamed the publication The National Magazine after assuming the role of editor in 1899, a position he held for the next forty years (Petersen is featured in the January 1922 issue of The National Magazine).

In 1905, Chapple published an anthology of prose and poetry submitted by The National Magazine readers called Heart Throbs, which sold over 2,000,000 copies and spawned a sequel, More Heart Throbs, in 1947. He used his experience as a journalist to publish more than 8,000 short interviews and biographies for national newspaper syndication, including those of Theodore Roosevelt, Guglielmo Marconi, and Nellie Melba. Chapple authored more than thirty novels and biographies, including Warren G. Harding the Man (1920) and Willkie and American Unity (1940). He expanded his national media profile by directing two movies, Graft (1915) and Annabelle Lee (1921), and with a national radio broadcast “Face to Face with Our President” in the 1930s. Chapple was also an early land booster in southern Florida where he wintered for thirty-six years before his death in Miami in 1950.