Fred Yost
Birth Date: November 6, 1889
Death Date: February 14, 1968
Artist Gallery
“Fred Does Whatever He Likes” was a title given to a biography written about Fred Yost by Hal Fry of the Herald. The following is taken directly from this column: “Fred Yost’s living style is like his painting style. He has fun with it. Fred John Yost was born in Switzerland, he’ sure, on November 6, 1889, he thinks. His father John brought the family to his country when Fred was about a year old—first to New York and later to Canton, Sebring and finally Alliance, where Yost Sr. loaded freight for a railroad. Fred like drawing and painting so far back he can’t remember how or when it stated—it was always that way. But through the public schools in Alliance he didn’t think of this as a career possibility. He wanted to be a newspaperman. He worked his way through Mt. Union College, finishing, he thinks, about 1912. Then he beat for New York and after kicking around for a time got a job as a proofreader for the Wall Street Journal. He combined this and art school until World War I took him in to the Army. In infantry, field artillery and ordnance duties he served with the 27th New York Division through St. Mihiel and the Argonne and the rest—in the process getting his hearing clobbered by blasts from his outfit’s own guns. Coming out a Sergeant in 1919, he went back to the Wall Street Journal briefly—then caught on as a staff artist for the (New York) Herald. For several years, when he felt like it, Yost would take a bus to the Mexican border and switch to a Mexican bus to carry him way down south, then make it any way he could to the places he wanted to see. On these trips he virtually becomes a peon, disappearing totally from those who know him—living with, like and clearly thoroughly liked by the people among whom he moves.” Yost was a graduate of the Art Students League and past president of the Ohio Watercolor Society. Fred Yost, a man who eminently loved the Mexican landscape, died at the age of 81 February 14, 1968.