Alvin McCoy


Alvin Scott McCoy was an American journalist of The Kansas City Star who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for local reporting and an outstanding work published the previous year about a series of articles that drove C. Wesley Roberts to resign his RNC chairmanship.

Biography

Alvin Scott McCoy was born on July 14, 1903, in Cheney, Kansas.
He received an A.B. degree in 1925 from the University of Kansas at Lawrence, majoring in chemistry.
After spending two years at Ford Motor Company agency in Dodge City, Kansas, and one year
traveling around the world in 1928–29, McCoy was first employed in
newspaper work as a reporter of the Evening Eagle in Wichita, Kansas.
He spent eighteen months on this newspaper and on the Wichita Morning Eagle.
In November, 1930, he joined the Kansas City Star as a reporter and worked on
general assignments.
Years later, McCoy served as the Star’s Pacific War correspondent in 1945.
That same year he became also a Kansas correspondent of the Kansas City Star, for which he covered
state politics, legislature, news, features and some editorial writing as well as
scientific stories.
In the 1954 the Board members decided that the Pulitzer Prize in the Local
Reporting, No Edition Time category should go to Alvin Scott McCoy of the
Kansas City Star from Missouri, “for a series of exclusive stories with led to the
resignation under fire of C. Wesley Roberts as Republican National Chairman.
Roberts was accused of collecting a $10,000 commission on the sale of a hospital to the State of Kansas which the state already owned.

Distinctions