Morley Cowles Ballantine
American editor
Elizabeth Morley Cowles Gale Ballantine (May 21, 1925 – October 10, 2009), known as Morley Cowles Ballantine, was an American newspaper publisher, editor, philanthropist, and women's rights activist. Scion of an Iowan newspaper publishing family, she and her second husband, Arthur A. Ballantine, purchased two Durango, Colorado newspapers in 1952, which they merged into The Durango Herald by 1960. The couple also started the Ballantine Family Fund, which supported arts and education in Southwest Colorado. After her husband's death in 1975, Ballantine took over the chairmanship of the family-owned publishing company, continuing to produce a weekly column and editorials. She received many journalism awards and several honorary degrees. She was inducted into the Colorado Business Hall of Fame in 2002 and was posthumously inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 2014.
Early life and family
Elizabeth Morley Cowles was born on May 21, 1925, in Des Moines, Iowa, the eldest of four children of John Cowles Sr. and his wife Elizabeth (née Bates). Her grandfather, Gardner Cowles Sr., had bought The Des Moines Register in 1903; her father became vice president, general
manager and associate publisher of the Des Moines morning and evening newspapers in the 1920s. In 1935, when her grandfather, father, and uncle Gardner Cowles Jr.
The public source identifies “Morley Cowles Ballantine” as american editor. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Morley, Cowles and Ballantine.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q26700164. VIAF identifies the subject as 22166476109307402507. The Library of Congress control number is n2022051839. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1925, 2009, 1952 and 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “Morley Cowles Ballantine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.