"During the years, I have held a lot of jobs in the United Press--from chairman down--but I was a REPORTER all the way," was the way Hugh Baillie summed up his forty-two-year career with the wire service in 1959. After a meteoric eight-year rise to general news manager and twelve years in various UP executive positions, Baillie emerged as president of the news agency and presided during two decades over a tripling of UP's clientele, including a historic move into the radio news business and a vast post-World War II expansion in the foreign news market. A fiercely competitive news-hound and a writer of burly, image-laden news copy, Baillie frequently left his executive duties to subordinates while he took to the field to direct his staff and report news events.

There were journalists on both sides of his family when Baillie was born on 23 October 1890 in Brooklyn, New York...