Tom Loyless

Who was Tom Loyless?

Tom W. Loyless is now best known as the managing owner of the Warm Springs spa resort. Prior to managing the resort, Loyless, a native of west Georgia, served as a newspaper reporter, editor and publisher at papers in Augusta, Columbus and Macon.

As a young editor Loyless earned a reputation for bluntness and a fiery temper that did not always limit itself to print. An 1897 dispute with H.C. Hanson, editor of the rival Macon Morning Telegraph in which Loyless accused Hanson of bias in reporting became so heated that when meeting Hanson in person Loyless struck him. Hanson in turn drew a handgun.

By 1915 Loyless was editor of the Augusta Chronicle. He was one of the few newspaper editors in Georgia to proclaim the innocence of Leo Frank and denounced his prosecutors as corrupt. Though he continued to edit the paper until 1920, his editorials about Frank cost him his local popularity and made him an enemy of the Ku Klux Klan. Soon after his departure from the Chronicle, he became the manager of the Warm Springs resort.

Loyless proved an ambitious caretaker of the much-in-disrepair property. After a young man suffering from polio discovered that the springs helped him, Loyless and Warm Springs attracted the attention of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had polio. Based on his own improvement, Roosevelt decided that Warm Springs could help victims of polio, and he worked together with Loyless on improvements to the resort and spa.