Harold Wallace Ross was born in Aspen and grew up in California. He quit school as a kid and went to work in newspaper city rooms on the West Coast. In World War I as a private, he switched from engineers to the staff of Stars and Stripes, the army newspaper. The staff chose him as the editor-in-chief. After the war he followed his Paris girlfriend, Jane Grant, back to New York, and married her. The couple launched The New Yorker in 1925. What I like about Ross is that he was an iconoclast and driven to succeed. Even though he barely had an education and came from almost no money, he started a magazine that has outlasted scores of others, and left his imprint on American and the world. He was a proud member of the Algonquin Round Table.