Commoner of the Press

One day, six years ago last week, the yacht Ohio dropped anchor in the harbor of Monrovia, Liberia. Her owner, Edward Wyllis Scripps, a big bristly-bearded man of 72 for whom the yacht had been Home for four years, had the U. S. Consul aboard to dine with him. After the consul had gone ashore "Old Man" Scripps felt suddenly, terribly, weary. "Too many cigars this evening, I guess," he mumbled. He sank into unconsciousness and in a few minutes his weak old heart ceased to beat.

The first full-length biography of "Old Man" Scripps, founder of chain-journalism in the U. S., appeared last month.* Its author, Gilson Gardner, longtime Washington correspondent for Scripps and his frequent companion aboard the Ohio, had every facility for making it an authentic portrait, including the insistence of his late employer that he do so.

If readers of Scripps (now Scripps-Howard) papers question the sincerity of a man who amassed a fortune of many millions, lived in quiet ease on a California ranch and aboard a yacht, yet caused his editors always to cry out for the masses, for Labor, for the underdog. Biographer Gardner answers them in two ways. Explicitly the ''Old Man" is quoted as saying of his wealth to a worker: "I can't help it. ... You are too lazy to think for yourselves. . . . You pay me a big income because you think I am worth it. I make decisions for you--perhaps one decision in six months--and that's what I am paid for. . . . Don't get the hired man habit." Implicitly Biographer Gardner tells the story of the poor boy who disliked being an underdog strongly enough to hoist himself to the top of the pile, and thereafter beckoned others to follow him.

"E. W.'s" own rise, as related by Biographer Gardner, followed no Horatio Alger pattern. He rarely got out of bed before noon, seldom went near his newspaper offices. For 25 of his 72 years he drank industriously, quitting abruptly at 46 when he found that his current consumption of a gallon of whiskey per day threatened his eyesight.

Moreover, he revised copybook maxims for his own purposes to: "Never do today what by any means you can put off until tomorrow, and never do yourself what you can get anyone else to do half as well as you can." But the Scripps brain did not idle with the Scripps body. He had another, a compensatory maxim which proved a true success formula: "Be ready with the right decision when the deciding time comes."

*LUSTY SCRITPS--Gilson Gardner--Vanguard ($3.50).

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