The Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) is an editorial column and comic strip newspaper syndication service based in the United States and established in 1902. The oldest syndicate still in operation, the NEA was originally a secondary news service to the Scripps Howard News Service; it later evolved into a general syndicate best known for syndicating the comic strips Alley Oop, Our Boarding House, Freckles and His Friends, The Born Loser, Frank and Ernest, and Captain Easy / Wash Tubbs; in addition to an annual Christmas comic strip. Along with United Feature Syndicate, the NEA was part of United Media from 1978 to 2011, and is now a division of Andrews McMeel Syndication. The NEA once selected college All-America teams, and presented awards in professional football and professional [NBA] basketball. Corporate history On June 2, 1902, the Newspaper Enterprise Association, based in Cleveland, Ohio, started as a news report service for different Scripps-owned newspapers. It started selling content to non-Scripps owned newspapers in 1907, and by 1909, it became a more general syndicate, offering comics, pictures and features as well. NEA moved headquarters from Cleveland to Chicago in 1915, with an office in San Francisco. NEA rapidly grew and delivered content to 400 newspapers in 1920. At that time, it had some 100 features available. From 1918 to 1928, Major League Baseball umpire Billy Evans served as NEA's sports editor and produced a syndicated sports column titled Billy Evans Says. His staff featured well-known sportswriters Jimmy Powers and Joe Williams. Alfred O. Andersson was general manager of the NEA from 1919 to 1921. By 1930, NEA had about 700 client newspapers. In 1934 and 1935, Mary Margaret McBride was the women's page editor for the NEA. Boyd Lewis became the executive editor of the NEA service in 1945; he was president in 1968. Writer Russell R. Winterbotham was fiction editor of the NEA throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Sports cartoonist and writer Murray Olderman had a long association with NEA. Firstly, his columns and cartoons were syndicated by the agency. He officially joined the company in 1952; becoming its sports editor in 1964; executive editor in 1968; and a contributing editor in 1971. He was the founder of the Jim Thorpe Trophy, for the National Football League's Most Valuable Player, and distributed by the NEA. He also founded the NEA All-Pro team in 1954, which ran through 1992. Although Olderman "retired"