Jack Harrison, the former president of the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group and vice president of the New York Times Company, has led an extraordinary life. Harrison began life in an orphanage, worked as a ditch digger and then married into one of the most prominent media families in the country. He was a liberal publisher whose crusading columns to improve black housing in the '60s won him a Pulitzer; and yet, he became a bottom-line-oriented business leader in the newspaper industry. A soft-spoken, humble man with a gentle manner and a love of books, he ran a company of 4,000 people.

Harrison, 69, spent part of his first year of life in an orphanage. Eventually he was raised by his mother and stepfather-a car dealer-in Des Moines, Iowa. Money was tight, but Harrison's mother (a member of the pushy moms club if there ever was one) knew Gardner Cowles, the owner of Look magazine and such Midwestern newspapers as the Des Moines Register, Minneapolis Star and Tribune, and decided to ask his advice. "I want my son to go to Harvard," she told Cowles. "He ought to go to [Phillips] Exeter then," Cowles replied. So, at the age of 13, Harrison, always a good student, was sent to one of the country's most elite prep schools. Harvard was almost a given for Exeter grads back then. "Out of my class, 91 applied and 89 got in," he says.

An English literature major, Harrison loved Harvard. And Gardner Cowles remained a huge influence in his life. Harrison began to date Cowles' daughter Lois when she was a freshman at Wellesley College, and he married her in 1955. The Cowles' world was a far cry from Des Moines, where Harrison would still go home every summer to work as a ditch digger. The Cowles, who had a home in Manhattan, hosted grand parties with celebrities such as Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers. "I was marrying over my head," says Harrison. Fortunately, Cowles found much to like in his son-in-law.

Upon Harrison's graduation in 1955, when he was considering a career in the foreign service, Cowles started talking to him about the newspaper business. He thought there was a great future in small papers, especially in the South. Cowles gave the young Harrison some prophetic advice. "America will follow the sun," he told Harrison about the demographic shift to the Sunbelt. "If I were you, I'd think about it."

For the next 15 years, Harrison learned the publishing business-first in Florida at the Fort Pierce News Tribune, where Harrison apprenticed in every department for $40 a week, and then back in New York in the accounting department for Look. The English literature major initially loathed the idea of number-crunching, but the business experience he gained at Look changed the course of his career. When he moved back to Fort Pierce a few years later, he ran the newspaper, which Cowles now owned. "I made every mistake in the book," Harrison says. "But Florida was soaring and you could make all kinds of mistakes and revenue would still be pouring in."

Harrison bought three more papers for Cowles-the Gainesville Sun, the Lakeland Ledger and the Ocala Star Banner. He became the publisher of the Gainesville Sun from 1962 to 1966, where he won a Pulitzer for his columns on the horrible living conditions of Gainesville's African-Americans.

"This was in the mid-'60s in north central Florida," he says. "It made everybody furious with me. I was young, 32 or 33. I was a Yankee, a newcomer, and I'd gone to Harvard." The morning after he won the Pulitzer, he walked into a diner for coffee and a biscuit. The waitress looked at him and asked, "Did anyone ever tell you you look like that guy who won the Pulitzer?" "Yeah," Harrison answered. "Betcha that makes you mad, don't it?" she asked.

In 1970, Cowles sold Look and some of his other publications to the New York Times Company. He told Harrison to come and work for him in New York. But Harrison had another idea. He wanted to keep buying small newspapers-this time for The New York Times. "I looked at Punch Sulzberger's [Art Sulzberger, the owner of the newspaper] earnings," Harrison says. "He needed a balance. A stream of earnings other than The New York Times." Harrison's pitch was that Sulzberger needed to buy smaller papers in regional markets, mainly in the South, where he believed all the growth would continue. That way, if the economy turned sour or the union went on strike-which it often did-Sulzberger would have other revenues. Apparently Sulzberger liked Harrison's pitch. "I'll give you some capital to buy some," he told Harrison.