Banker's Sideline

In Southern cities where most of the Big Business is controlled by a few men, it is not unusual for a banker, landowner or merchant to be a newspaper publisher by avocation. In Louisville Banker James B. Brown was such a publisher. Political and financial dictator of Kentucky, one-time president of National Bank of Kentucky and BancoKentucky Co., he was seen in the offices of his Herald-Post perhaps once a year. Hence last week, when the paper passed in bankruptcy sale to John B. Gallagher, New York advertising man, for $315,000, it was but a faint anticlimax to Banker Brown's earlier troubles: the collapse of his financial institutions.

When Banker Brown bought the Herald and Post in 1924, merging them the next year, his ambition was to challenge the longtime dominance of the Courier-Journal and Times, published by Judge Robert Worth Bingham. He poured nearly five million dollars into the combined papers, did make a fairly potent political mouthpiece. But he could not shake the traditional supremacy of the Courier-Journal, achieved in the days of the late great Editor "Marse Henry," Watterson. After BancoKentucky's crash, Publisher Brown started an economy regime in the Herald-Post. An inferior paper was the result. Last December the daily went into bankruptcy; last week it was sold.

Publisher Brown kept no office at his newspaper plant, or anywhere else. Like Circusman John Ringling, he always conducted his business at night, principally after 9 o'clock, until daylight, "because I find I meet with less disturbance than working during the day." He would arise about 4 p. m. at his Cherokee Park home, go to town in the evening, to a branch of his National Bank. There he would sit at the desk of a vice president and, with barely the scratch of a pen, direct his myriad affairs political, financial, mercantile. And there he would issue occasional orders for his paper. There, at midnight or later, his business associates would have to go if they wanted to talk with him. After his banks failed it was observed that Publisher Brown went nearly every night to the Herald-Post office. While it lasted, it was all he had left.

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