BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY

Charles Dow was the founder, along with Edward Jones and the uncommemorated Charles Bergstresser. Clarence Barron became the proprietor, as his heirs are today. By common agreement of everyone connected with The Wall Street Journal, Bernard Kilgore was the genius.

Barney Kilgore was the Journal's dominant personality practically from the moment he was appointed managing editor in 1941, at the precocious age of 32, until his death in 1967, at the untimely age of 59. Over those years he built the paper's circulation to 1.1 million from 33,000. He created the philosophy, news formulas, corporate organization and much of the physical infrastructure that carried the Journal's circulation even further, making it the nation's largest newspaper, with a circulation at times breaking two million. Warren H. Phillips, chairman of Dow Jones & Co., says "I don't think there's any question" that Kilgore was the most important figure in the newspaper's 100-year history.

"It was not a one man's labor, only a one man's vision," the Journal's editorial columns remarked on Kilgore's death. The vision was a national newspaper serving business readers--as one of his most quoted aphorisms put it, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. The heart of the vision was the identification of a community for the paper to serve, a community defined not by geography but by common interests. "If you are publishing in Elkhart, Ind., you have got to edit for the Elkhart reader," he said. "The business community is our Elkhart."

For this community, Barney Kilgore designed a new newspaper. "It doesn't have to have happened today to be news," he proclaimed. The news of the day as previously understood would be displayed in two front-page columns, "What's News." A third column would be filled with recurring weekly features; as Washington bureau chief he'd developed the prototype, "Washington Wire." Stories in the other columns would be "different."

Defining these stories, in effect changing the definition of news, was the great newsroom struggle of the "Kilgore revolution." Through trial and error, the front-page "leader" evolved for the outside columns (and the lighter "A-hed" for the center). The format was a catchy lead paragraph, a "nut graf" explaining the theme, and enough space to tell the story. With this new style, reporters were forced to ask deeper questions, not merely about momentary events but about ongoing situations and trends--the kind of news the business reader could use. In a 1966 note reflecting on his career building a new paper, Barney Kilgore rated the appearance of the page-one leader stories as "my own biggest contribution to the change."

"Nobody was writing those stories in those days," Chairman Phillips remembers. "He didn't just revolutionize The Wall Street Journal, he revolutionized the newspaper business. Today we take it for granted when other newspapers write about currents in society that have nothing to do with what happened yesterday."

The best news would be lost, of course, without the physical and financial abilities to reach a Portland-to-Portland business community. When Dow Jones President Kenneth C. Hogate fell ill in 1942, the company decided to appoint a general manager as chief executive in effect but not in title. Editor William Grimes turned down the job, and instead practically coerced a Kilgore appointment. Thus key business decisions advanced the Kilgore vision.

Rationed newsprint that could have been used for immediately profitable ads, for example, was used instead to build circulation. The Kilgore aphorism was "Now is the time to build. There'll be lots of time later to get advertising." After the war, the company's technicians developed devices to link a growing network of printing plants. As circulation grew, the ads came. Dow Jones earned more than $13 million in 1966, the last full year of Kilgore's tenure, compared with some $211,000 in 1945, when he officially became chief executive.

All this was accomplished without a hint of flamboyance. Instead, Kilgore lore records self-effacing acts while roaming halls in shirt sleeves and loosened tie--for example of calmly obeying a printer who, not knowing he was talking to the chairman, told him not to take a paper from a stack. Of sitting down to play the piano for guests. Of pitching in beside the workmen on mechanical repairs, as for a hobby he tinkered with a Model T Ford. In memoirs, long-time Editor Vermont Royster and the late Chairman William Kerby each report being told, "I'm the only guy around here who can't afford to get mad."

These qualities, shadows of which shade the internal Dow Jones culture today, befit a man of his time and place. Born in Albany, Ind., where his father was superintendent of schools, he was raised in South Bend and attended DePauw University in Greencastle. He hired other DePauw graduates as his top managers, and indeed joined the Journal by applying to "Casey" Hogate, another DePauw alumnus. He reported for work in June 1929, and quickly attracted attention in posts in New York, San Francisco and Washington. President Franklin Roosevelt at least twice answered press-conference questions by instructing other reporters to "read Kilgore in The Wall Street Journal."

While this early promise was redeemed by a stellar career, no man is without mistakes and failures. At one time he toyed with the notion of changing the newspaper's name, perhaps to "Business Day." His last words to Bill Kerby were "Bill, is my baby going to make it?"

He was speaking of The National Observer, started five years earlier as a national weekend newspaper for general readers. The Observer did not make it, continuing to lose money until it was closed 10 years after his death. While a commendable editorial product, it did not serve the identifiable community the early Kilgore envisioned for the Journal. But Henry Gemmill, its final editor, points to successful general-interest publications such as Smithsonian, and believes the Observer would have succeeded but for Kilgore's death: "It was his baby, and he would have figured out what he was doing wrong."

An ability to abandon his own ideas quickly if they didn't work was one facet of the Kilgore management style, his contemporaries recall. While mild in demeanor, he was an insistent taskmaster. He would use his commute from Princeton to mark up each morning's newspaper with comments and criticism, to be dispatched to writers or discussed at a morning kaffeeklatsch with top editors. "He never tried to pick the stories for page one, but he was always sparking ideas," says Henry Gemmill, who was also managing editor and page-one editor of the Journal. Some worked, but no one could figure out how to employ other suggestions. "You never felt free to dismiss it out of hand, because very often there was a kernel of truth if you could divine it."

"I never figured out whether he was really a modest fellow," Vermont Royster recalls. His habit of going to his colleagues' offices rather than calling them to his, for example, "left him in complete control; when he was ready to leave, he could leave." Jane Bancroft Cook, the senior member of the Dow Jones owning family, remembers, "He had this wonderful way of making you think it was your idea, and you should do it, when he had it in mind all along." It took a while knowing him, she adds, "to realize what an extraordinary man he was."

"He didn't give the impression of a profound thinker. There were no flashes of brilliance or insight," Warren Phillips remembers. "The heart of it was he was a visionary. The key to the loyalty and almost adoration he inspired in his colleagues was that he had recruited them to work on this enterprise and, hey, it worked."

Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal.