The Chattanooga Library’s downtown branch is highlighting the lives of two Ochs brothers, but not the one most well known.
The exhibit, “The Other Two Ochs Brothers: George, Milton and the Dynamo of Dixie,” looks at the lives of George Washington Ochs-Oakes and Milton Barlow Ochs, younger brothers to Adolph Ochs, the influential German Jewish newspaperman who owned The Chattanooga Times and The New York Times.
“I feel like a lot is known about Adolph Ochs,” said Olivia Anderson, the library’s local history archivist, in an interview. “His name is literally like carved into stone in our city.”
Adolph Ochs played on an international stage after acquiring The New York Times, but he considered Chattanooga home, Anderson said, and the tether was his family. George and Milton, though, spent a lot of time in Chattanooga running in prominent social circles and contributing to projects that are foundational to the city’s identity.
Chattanooga Public Library opens exhibit memorializing ‘other’ Ochs brothers
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The exhibit came to be after Ochs-Oakes’ grandson, John Oakes, in Long Island, New York, came upon family artifacts, a lot of which were about Chattanooga. Oakes felt that the materials belonged in the city and donated it all to the public library.
The Ochs family — George and Milton and their parents, Julius and Bertha, and three sisters, Nannie, Ada and Matilda — followed Adolph Ochs to Chattanooga from Knoxville, where the Ochs family had settled after the Civil War.
George Washington Ochs-Oakes became the mayor of Chattanooga in 1893 and was reelected in 1895, serving as the city’s first Jewish mayor, Anderson said. In Ochs-Oakes’ autobiography, he touted paying off the city debt and created a surplus for the first time in its history.
Ochs-Oakes served as chief of police for a period of time before he became mayor, served as president of the board of education in the late 1800s and created the public library board.
“When he was in Chattanooga, he also really had his hands in a lot of pies and was always seen as just an incredibly fair and just person,” Anderson said.
Ochs-Oakes eventually moved to Philadelphia to manage a newspaper there and ended up managing a magazine out of The New York Times called Current History.
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In the early 1900s, he changed the last name of his sons to Oakes, the English form of the German word Ochs, and hyphenated his own in response to the actions of Germany during World War I.
“He felt very ashamed of his German heritage, and he felt that he did not want to burden his sons with what it would mean to have a very German last name,” Anderson said.
Wes Hasden, long-time assistant to Ruth Holmberg, Adolph Ochs’ granddaughter and former publisher of the Chattanooga Times, confirmed the motivation for the name change.
“There was a great deal of anti-German feeling in the United States when World War I started for very obvious reasons,” Hasden said. “And he just thought it would be better, particularly for his children, to not be burdened with a German sounding name at that particular point in history.”
Milton Ochs was quite a flamboyant person, Anderson said, and the evidence is in his diaries, letters and scrapbooks.
“He’s very clever with words, really loved to create little quips and truisms and little quotes and stuff,” Anderson said. “I also read a lot of statements made by other people and family members that he had an outrageous sense of style and that he dressed very well, very brightly, very loudly. He loved big colors and loud prints, and people found him to be a little bit ridiculous.”
Milton was a lifelong diarist and kept scrapbooks of memories, including, on display in the exhibit, a book full of caricatures of members of his social club he started for men who had lived in the city for over 50 years. Milton oversaw the building of Mizpah Congregation’s temple, which was funded by Adolph Ochs and built in memory of Julius and Bertha Ochs, their parents.
Mizpah Congregation, Chattanooga’s Reform Judaism congregation, still uses the Julius and Bertha Ochs Memorial Temple, and portraits of the couple, as well as a portrait of Adolph Ochs, hang on a wall in the lobby outside the sanctuary, and artifacts and information about the family are found throughout the building.
Milton Ochs was the managing editor of the Chattanooga Times, was on the Chattanooga Memorial Auditorium Committee, a founder of Lookout Mountain Park and president of the Scenic Highway Association.
“George and Milton are the other brothers, but they they were noteworthy folk in their own right,” Hasden said. “They just didn’t have the same stage to play on as Adolph did.”
The exhibit is made up of materials from the John Oakes donation and materials from Milton Ochs’ family that were donated in the ’60s, shortly after he died. It is the first exhibit Anderson has curated since she started at the library in September.
“I really got into our collections to try and find the presence of these two men everywhere that I could, and just highlight both their accomplishments, but also just who they were as individuals,” Anderson said. “They’re fascinating, they’re strange, they’re funny, and being able to pick out and find those interpersonal family dynamics in these documents has been so much fun.”
The exhibit is already open to the public, and the library will host a free opening reception from 4-6 p.m. Aug. 2 with remarks from Anderson, according to the library’s website. It will be on display through September 6.
Contact religion reporter Kailee Shores at kshores@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6659.