Newspaperman Walker Stone was born in Okemah, Oklahoma on 8 May 1904 to John Seborn and Stella (Bynum) Stone. After receiving his Bachelor of Science degree from Oklahoma State University in 1926, he attended law school at George Washington University from 1927 to 1929.
Stone began his newspaper career in 1927, as a copy editor on the Washington Daily News, a Scripps-Howard newspaper. Originally intending the job to provide money for law school, it instead decided him on a career in journalism, and he gave up the idea of law. As early as 1932 Stone wrote several analytical articles on the prospects of the St. Lawrence Seaway. (There are no copies of these in the collection.) By 1943 he was an editor with the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance, and two years later was one of eighteen editors selected by General Dwight D. Eisenhower to inspect liberated Nazi prison camps. In 1947 Stone visited China, Japan, and various Pacific islands as a guest of the War Department, and was also appointed to the nominating committee for the Pulitzer Prize awarded to cartoonists. In an article concerning Eisenhower's re-election campaign in 1952, Stone conceived the later-famous phrase, “Ike is running like a dry creek.” This statement is reported to have prodded the re-election committee to step up its campaign.
With the retirement of George B. Parker in 1953, Stone became editor-in-chief of the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance. In that capacity he made several trips abroad, to Russia, the Belgian Congo, Vietnam, et cetera. In Russia in 1962 with the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Stone drew attention by exacting from Premier Khrushchev a premature admission that the USSR had rejected the Baruch Plan for sharing nuclear secrets.
After retiring as editor-in-chief of the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance in 1969, Stone continued as a director of the organization and president and chairman of the Scripps-Howard Foundation until his death on 19 March 1973.
