Scripps-Howard

(See front cover)

"Remember, you are the trapeze performers of the organization. On one side is the fat lady's lap, on the other side is a cage of man-eating lions and there is no net to catch you if you fall."

So chirruped Publisher Roy Wilson Howard of the Scripps-Howard chain-papers nine years ago to an enthusiastic, moonfaced subordinate named Tom Sharp who, believing that the city of El Paso, Texas needed another newspaper, but unable to persuade his chiefs, had gone to his chiefs' retired Big Chief, to "Old Man" Edward Wyllis Scripps himself, and obtained personal backing, started the El Paso Post.

Tom Sharp had been editor of the Scripps-Howard Press in Memphis. All he had asked of his chiefs was enough money for a hatful of type, one reporter and a couple of business aids. That was the scale on which Old Man Scripps started most of his papers, beginning with the Cleveland Press. But that was not the way Roy Howard and his partner Robert Paine Scripps, the Old Man's youngest son. thought things should be done in modern times.

After a year, however, the Scripps-Howard "Fat Lady" took the El Paso Post into her ample lap. And last week the dominant El Paso Post absorbed its evening competitor, the Herald, becoming the Herald-Post.

If the circumstances of the birth of the Post illustrated early Scripps-Howard characteristics, so did the purchase of the Herald exemplify later characteristics. For in just such fashion have Partners Howard and Scripps and General Manager William Waller Hawkins set about "cleaning up the territory" wherever there was one newspaper too many. Not counting merged properties they now have 25 newspapers. Sometimes, as in Akron (Times-Press), Knoxville (News-Sentinel), Memphis (Press-Scimitar) they have bought. Elsewhere, as in Des Moines, Norfolk, Terre Haute, Sacramento, they have moved out. For Scripps-Howard, no cluttered fields.

When the editors and publishers of the land hold their annual convention in Manhattan next week, of larger interest than Scripps-Howard's purchase in El Paso will be its last purchase before that. The profession will be asking about, discussing the first "shakedown" figures on the daring purchase of the New York World by the S-H chain's ace, the New York Telegram.

How the morning, evening and Sunday circulation pies of the World have been cut is shown in the following summaries, compiled from the frankest statements and shrewdest guesses available:

Pie 6 Present

Morning Pieces Totals

WORLD 400,000

Times 70,000 497,000

Herald Tribune.... 65,000 363,000

American 65,000 317,000

Daily News 50,000 1,346,000

Mirror 5,000 596,362

Evening Pie & Pieces Present Totals 276,000 World-Telegram 200,000 440,000 Sun 15,000 300,000 Journal 30.000 680.000 Post . 5,000 102,000 Sunday Now WORLD 492,000 Times 50,000 807,997 Herald Tribune. . . . 100,000 540,000 American 200,000 1,250,000 Sunday News 96,000 1,862,000

In advertising lineage the World-Telegram got practically all of the Evening World's. The American got the morning want ads--a juicy chunk of business. Among the others the Times seemed to show the greatest gain, the Herald Tribune, and Daily News ranking next. But the newspapers' excited advertisements in each other's pages, and the Easter trade, made all advertising figures inconclusive.

The New Figures. Extinguishing the dying Worlds brought Publishers Scripps & Howard into strong national relief. Mr. Hearst is aging; his sons are youths. Mr. Ochs and Mr. Reid are great conservative impersonalities. Mr. Curtis never has loomed as a newspaper publisher. Except for Publishers Patterson & McCormick, there are no other national newspaper personages except Chain-publishers Robert Paine Scripps and Roy Wilson Howard.

"Old Man" Scripps, like "Old Joe" Pulitzer used to wear a beard. "Bob" Scripps has been growing one since October. From a dubious trowel beard it has evolved into a handsome spade affair, Messianic full face and like Italos Balbo's in profile. Partner Howard's visage remains the same--chipmunkish, irrepressible, oriental. Quicker to read than their faces are their respective offices, high in the New York Central Building. One office (the door of which is rarely shut) is a harmony of brown oak with beamed ceiling, paneled walls, high bookshelves. The leaded panes of the windows are stained with nautical legends--fish, dolphins; a bit of an ancient maritime chart; a square rigger. A great tapestry alone adorns the walls. Here, at a massive oak desk sits the massive youngest Scripps, editorial director of 25 newspapers, amid a sombre ruggedness that seems a filial translation of the father's hardiness complex.

Farther down the hall, guarded from the main corridor by two secretarial offices, is a flaming lacquer-red door. When this door is thrown open, the scene is like the bursting of a rocket. Dazzling golds, lacquer reds and blacks provide a setting for a wealth of Chinese ornament--scrolls, silks, rare carvings, vases, a golden Buddha. The walls are papered with golden Chinese tea-paper. On the floor is a great rug of gold, red & black with a geometric pseudo-oriental pattern -- designed by Publisher Howard and made in China to his order. The furniture is of lacquer red, trimmed with black. At the red desk are red dictaphone, jars of white jade for clips and pens. A circular mirror five feet in diameter, framed in red and black, hangs on the wall behind the publisher's chair.

In a small anteroom, papered in black, are a draped couch, and more oriental curios--among them an opium pipe, trophy of a police raid in Pittsburgh. Adjoining the anteroom is a spacious gold-walled lavatory, the plumbing fixtures of black porcelain. In a corner stands a lacquer red refrigerator with the motor disguised as a gold pagoda.

In neither office will be found the trophies so dear to most newspaper publishers --autographed pictures, framed letters, copies of notable editions of their newspapers. All such are stored away.

In one respect the offices fail as a reflection of their occupants. One would think, especially after seeing the beard, that Publisher Scripps is the older man. He is 35 to Howard's 48.

The beard has earned for Bob Scripps a good deal of raillery, which he quietly relishes. Driving across the U. S.,* he says, he one day neglected to shave. For amusement he "let it grow," toyed with it from week to week. Amusement it may have been at the start; but the beard is now becoming part of the grave, punditical figure which Publisher Scripps suggests as he pens learned treatises on economics. Once more the organization is getting an Old Man. Something in the atmosphere of the Scripps-Howard offices suggests that this was necessary, that the subordinates feel that Partner Howard's flair has unduly (though unconsciously) eclipsed Partner Scripps's sterling worth. Howard for a story--yes--but Scripps for a policy. The order of their names in the partnership will probably be increasingly justified in the public mind.

Most men working in the Scripps-Howard organization find difficulty in defining where one of their chiefs leaves off and the other begins. Officially, Scripps is president, controlling stockholder (he inherited the 40% ownership from his father) and editorial director. If imagination be stretched he could discharge his good friend Howard, second-biggest stockholder or General Manager Hawkins, third biggest. (The rest is distributed throughout the chain.) But neither aspires to be a dictator. To almost everyone in the company they are "Bob" and "Roy" (Howard particularly feels embarrassment at being "mistered"). Of the two Roy Howard, as everyone knows, is the dyed-in-wool reporter, the scoopster, the man who wants to be where everything is going on--and is. (Last week he returned from a holiday in Havana. Scripps was at his Ridgefield, Conn, estate named "Kinderwall"--"Woods of the Little Children.") Howard is the more inventive; Scripps is the balance wheel that keeps him from wild tangents.

Old Man Scripps once said: "I'm going to have my troubles with Bob, but . . . when he gets his stride, he will be more like me than either Jim or John."

At that time Bob was twelve--gangling, stoopshouldered and over six feet tall. His father had retired from business, entrusted the newspaper management to the late James G., eldest son. From the age of 17 Bob Scripps was either working on a Scripps paper, traveling and studying, or learning directly from his father. When Old Man Scripps died in 1926, Bob was not only qualified to carry on but had fulfilled his father's prediction: he was most like him. He has lived up to the admonition embodied in a letter by Old Man Scripps when the latter embarked on the yachting cruise from which he was not to return:

"I should prefer that you should succeed in being in all things a gentleman, according to the real meaning of the word, than that you should vastly increase the money value of the estate. Being a gentleman, you cannot fail to devote your whole mind and energy to the service of the plain people who constitute the vast majority of the people of the United States."

*He has several cars, usually drives a Mercedes, never takes a chauffeur. Roy Howard, impulsive and impatient, is a "terrible driver," rarely takes the wheel of his Minerva or Locomobile.

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