Carlton Cole "Carl" Magee, the man who started the newspaper that would become The Albuquerque Tribune, was a person of cool courage, impregnable integrity and a sharp mind.

His battles against political corruption led to the ousting of dishonest politicians and to revelations of the Teapot Dome scandal.

It was Magee who came up with the slogan "Give light and the people will find their own way," which would be adopted by the Scripps Howard newspaper chain.

Before starting The Tribune, he owned the Albuquerque Morning Journal, and he winged a district judge with a pistol shot.

Oh, yeah, he also invented the parking meter.

Magee was a lanky, blue-eyed, square-jawed Iowa native. He practiced law in Oklahoma for 17 years before, at age 46, moving to Albuquerque in 1919 because his wife's health required a drier climate.

He figured Albuquerque, a town of 15,000 back then, was pretty well fixed for lawyers, so he gave journalism a go.

In 1920, Magee bought the Journal, the state's largest paper, with a circulation of 7,000, from U.S. Sen. Albert Bacon Fall of New Mexico and some of Fall's wealthy Republican supporters.

It was Fall himself who became one of Magee's primary targets in the editor's untiring probes into political corruption.

Investigations started by Magee showed Fall, by then secretary of the interior in President Harding's Cabinet, accepted large bribes from oil magnates in return for private leases on U.S. petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming and Elk Hills in California.

Fall resigned in 1923 and was later convicted of accepting a $100,000 bribe.

In retaliation, Fall's political machine "persuaded" financial institutions to call in Magee's notes and to refuse to renew his loans.

Magee was forced to sell the Journal in April 1922, but two months later he started Magee's Independent, a weekly. On March 23, 1923, just a couple of weeks before the paper started daily publication, he changed its name to The New Mexico State Tribune.

Impressed by Magee's aggressive brand of journalism, Scripps Howard bought The Tribune on Sept. 24, 1923, kept Magee on as editor and assumed use of the "Give light" slogan he had created for The Tribune.

Meanwhile, "Turning on the Light," Magee's front-page column in The Tribune, continued to reveal shady doings and make enemies for him statewide.

In August 1925, one of these enemies, District Judge David Leahy, attacked Magee in the lobby of a hotel in Las Vegas, N.M.

Leahy knocked Magee to the floor, kicking him and breaking several of his ribs before Magee drew a .25-caliber pistol and fired twice.

One shot hit Leahy in the arm, but the other killed a bystander. Magee was acquitted of manslaughter charges, but the innocent man's death was a shadow on Magee's spirit for the remainder of his days.

At the end of 1927, Scripps Howard transferred Magee from Albuquerque to the Oklahoma City News.

It was while Magee was editor there that he played a major role in something that would have a more lasting effect than any of his crusading journalism: He helped invent the parking meter and became president of the Magee-Hale Park-O-Meter Co.

Magee, 73, died in Oklahoma City in 1946, almost a quarter-century after he planted the seed for The Albuquerque Tribune.