Other than a few months at Poughkeepsie Business College in 1881, Munsey's business education was largely self-taught. He began working in a grocery in Lisbon Falls, Maine. After teaching himself telegraphy, he left the grocery before he was seventeen and became telegraph operator in several New England hotels. His appointment as local manager of the Western Union Telegraph Company office in Augusta, the state capital, was decisive to his career.
Here he was exposed to politics on both state and national levels through his position in the telegraph office and his residence in Augusta House, where he met many of the state's leading politicians, including Sen. James G. Blaine, Augusta's own presidential hopeful. Munsey acquired a taste for politics that he would indulge throughout his life.
In Augusta, Munsey was also able to observe the town's other significant activity, magazine publishing. The magazines published in Augusta were cheap tabloids that served primarily as an extremely lucrative mail-order advertising medium. The originator of this particular format was Edward C. Allen, the owner of the People's Literary Companion, who had amassed the largest fortune in town.
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