Alfred Oscar Andersson (1874–1950) was the publisher of the Dallas Dispatch and, briefly, of the Dallas Dispatch-Journal, daily afternoon newspapers of general circulation published in Dallas, Texas. Growing up and career Andersson was born in Liverpool, England, on December 10, 1874, to Alfred Carolus Andersson (1840–1882), a cotton broker, and Elizabeth Ann Falk (maiden; 1851–1931). The family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, in the early 1880s. Andersson's father died there, and his mother moved the family back to Liverpool, and then, in 1884, to Weimar, Germany, where Andersson attended school for five years. His mother re-married in 1889 to Dr. Henry John Lampe (1844–1910) and the family returned to Kansas City. She died in San Antonio, Texas, in 1931 at age seventy-nine. Lampe died in Kansas City. Andersson's career in newspapers began during his teenage years when he worked at odd jobs around the shop where his stepfather published a German-language newspaper. He wrote and edited campus publications while a student at Princeton University from 1893 to 1895 and then returned to Kansas City to take a job on the Kansas City World, a Scripps-McRae newspaper. He then moved on to reporting and editing jobs on Scripps papers in St. Louis, Missouri and Chicago, Illinois. In 1898 Andersson reported on the Spanish–American War from Cuba and Puerto Rico for the United Press, which then appointed him manager of the UP's Kansas City bureau. In 1906 he scouted Texas for a suitable location to start a newspaper for Scripps-McRae. According to newspaper lore, he stopped at a downtown Dallas drugstore, noticed it sold fine cigars, and concluded "if those are the cigars the men here favor, this must be a good town." As he contemplated starting a paper in Dallas he learned that another man was in town with the same idea and likewise with Scripps-McRae's tentative promise to back it. Confronting Col. Milton A. McRae, he was told that Scripps-McRae's support would go to the man who got a paper on the street first; Andersson then hastily threw together the four-page first issue of the Dallas Dispatch, deployed boys to sell the paper on the street, and the Dispatch became the Scripps paper in Dallas. In 1911, he inaugurated the Houston Press,{{Sfn|Houston Press||p=}} a Scripps-McRae newspaper in Houston, Texas. While editing the Press he retained editorship of the Dispatch and continued to live in Dallas. With a 1916 reorganization of