January 22, 1873: Robert McCulloch Dick was born in Edinburgh, Scotland
On January 22, 1873, Robert McCulloch Dick, editor and publisher of the weekly magazine Philippines Free Press, who coined the name "Juan de la Cruz" in generic reference to Filipinos, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. His parents were the former Lily Smith and John Dick, a businessman.
He attended a public school from the age of four and, at the age of 12, entered a private academy where he finished a three-year course in two, while also taking a two-year course in German at night school. Childhood memories are of bitter poverty after his father's untimely death, which left the mother, known, he proudly recalls, as "the honest widow Dick", as the family's sole support. Faced in his early teens with earning his own living, he apprenticed to a mapmaking concern in Edinburgh.