(The following essay discusses Houston Harriman Harte and his brother, Edward Holmead Harte.)

Harte-Hanks Communications--the San Antonio-based media company with major holdings in newspapers, television, advertising shoppers, and direct marketing--was taken over on 11 September 1984 after a twelve-year run on the New York Stock Exchange, which included fifty consecutive quarters of earnings-per-share growth. A team of company insiders, among them Edward and Houston Harte, consolidated control over the media company cofounded by their father, the late Robert William Houston Harte. It was a move that might have pleased the elder Harte, a Missouri-born newspaperman who began his publishing empire in the western Texas town of San Angelo in the 1920s.

The 1984 buyout and subsequent sell-off of some of Harte-Hanks major media properties were another phase in the evolution of a fifty-year-old media empire started by the elder Houston Harte and Bernard Hanks, rival newspaper publishers who formed a partnership...