Founder of the Huntington Quarterly and Marshall alumnus Jack Houvouras spoke Monday night to students interested in entrepreneurship as a part of the Society for Advancement of Management’s LevelUp Speaker Series.
Houvouras, a 1988 graduate of the W. Page Pitt School of Journalism and Mass Communications and 2021 Hall of Fame inductee, said that it was an honor to come back and speak.
“No one’s ever asked me to come back and talk,” he said.
Over the course of his speech, Houvouras discussed the hardships the Huntington Quarterly went through, the connections and experiences he had and some of the advice he had received and wanted to share with upcoming entrepreneurs.
“If you fail, so what? You’re 22 years old.”
While at Marshall, Houvouras served in various different roles within The Parthenon, including Executive Editor, where he found his love of feature writing.
“I love writing about people,” he said.
Houvouras started the Huntington Quarterly only a year after graduating and worked “12 hour days, seven days a week” for the first couple of years. The first thing he got for the business was a $2600 Macintosh computer, where he had to scroll across the two-page layout on the nine-inch screen.
On top of being inducted into the School of Journalism Hall of Fame in 2021, Houvouras was awarded Business Innovator of the Year by the Herald-Dispatch in 2014. The West Virginia Small Business Association gave Houvouras the Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 1994.
He said he remembers his first day in the journalism program and saw Marvin Stone and others up on the wall and thought, “I’ll never get up there, but I’m going to try.”
In his time writing, Houvouras has interviewed many people such as Paul Newman, Chuck Yeager and Brad D. Smith.
The Marshall University Foundation reached out to Houvouras and asked if he would spend the weekend with John Deaver Drinko, the first man to ever give Marshall $1 million. Houvouras said the “guy was brilliant, but he went to bed at two in the morning, woke up at five. Wore me out.”
Placing Drinko on the cover led to him being so happy he “ordered 500 copies for his friends in Cleveland,” Houvouras said.
Drinko told Houvouras that Marshall needed a state-of-the-art library, which he then took to the president of Marshall at the time. Drinko then donated $2 million and raised another $2 million on top of that. The John Deaver Drinko Library celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.
