In the spring of 1945, the New York Times gave a series of lectures to educators, in a learning partnership with the NYC Board of Education, providing an overview of the newspaper game. Teachers were given the chance to hear directly from the actual people who put the broadsheet together with the hopes of reinforcing “the importance of a free press in safeguarding our democratic ideals and institutions.” The results took the form of this marvelous little book, The Newspaper: Its Making And Its Meaning. It’s broken into eight chapters, each covered by a Times staffer and this week we’ll be scanning in some of our favorite parts.

To kick things off, we bring you the wisdom of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the grandfather of the current publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. who took the reigns from his dad Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. He wrote the final chapter, “The Newspaper’s Role in Community.” Click through and learn about the Gray Lady’s even older publisher Adolph Simon Ochs, his daughter that Arthur the I married, and the paper’s policy towards hiring communists, among other fascinating insights.