Owen D. Young was born on October 27, 1874, on a hill farm outside Van Hornesville, in the southeastern corner of Herkimer County, New York. His parents, Jacob Smith Young and Ida Brandow Young, came from Palatine and Dutch families long settled in the vicinity. As a boy he learned the demanding routine of a dairy farmer's life, a disciplinary routine he never forgot. Book learning began in the one-room schoolhouse in the village, followed by high school years at East Springfield Academy. College was made possible for him by two fortunate circumstances; President Alpheus Baker Hervey of St. Lawrence University, preaching in Van Hornesville, met the boy and promised him a place, and a bumper crop of hops on the farm brought in enough cash to overcome the financial hurdle. In the fall of 1890, he departed for college and the wider world.

Young graduated from St. Lawrence in 1894 and headed for Boston, a law career in his mind. As a youth he had watched lawyers arguing in cool courtrooms while farmers like his father sweated long hours in the summer heat. He completed the three-year course at Boston University in two years, working his way. Then came marriage to his St. Lawrence sweetheart, Josephine Edmonds, children, and an increasingly successful career at the Boston law firm of Tyler and Young.

The law firm handled many cases involving the growing electric utility industry, and Young's success in this work brought him to the attention of the General Electric Company, which he joined in 1913 as General Counsel and Vice President. GE was the base for Young's subsequent career; he became chairman of the board in 1922, but his activities ranged far beyond that company. In 1919, his work was crucial to the establishment of the Radio Corporation of America, of which he became founding chairman. He fostered the development of radio broadcasting, keenly aware of what the new link to the outside world could mean to the isolated homestead of his boyhood. And, as a business leader, he preached a novel concept of corporate governance -- that management should be responsible to three equally important constituencies: the stockholders who supplied the capital, the employees who did the work, and the public who were entitled to an honest product at a fair price.

Owen D. Young, Time Magazine Man of the Year 1929Young also became an important figure on the world scene, widely respected for sound judgment and negotiating skills, which he applied throughout the 1920s to the problems posed by the impossible burden of German reparations payments imposed by the victorious Allies of World War I. This work earned Young honors as Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1929, and it placed Young, a lifelong Democrat, at the forefront of possible candidates for the United States presidency, in a tide of public approval which reached impressive proportions in 1932. However, his wife's ill-health precluded any such effort on Young's part, and he said so, typically, through the Little Falls Evening Times in May 1932.

Education, good education, as an essential element in America's well-being, was another of Young's concerns. As a St. Lawrence trustee, he did much for his own college, whose library bears his name; as a member of the state's Board of Regents, he initiated the most comprehensive survey of New York's educational system up to that time. In 1946, he was named by Governor Dewey to study the need for a state university -- a project which led eventually to the present multi-campus State University of New York.

But perhaps his most cherished achievement in education occurred as the result of a fire. In 1926, the wood schoolhouse in Van Hornesville burned. Young donated a replacement (of stone, not wood) which grew to be one of the first centralized schools in the state and a model for the future. In the generally reliable 1940 WPA Guide to New York State, it is amusing to note that while the handsome new school was accurately described as a Georgian Colonial stone building, it was also said to be Young's own home -- the result of a waggish neighbor's response to the query, "Where is the Young mansion?" There was no mansion, but in a sense the wag was right.