O. C. D. Housed

College dailies have a way of waxing introspective now & then about their college and questioning its physical expansion. Especially has Mother Yale, into whose broad lap have lately dropped many millions for masonry, been asked by the Yale Daily News whither she was listing. Last week at the News's annual banquet given by a new board of editors for the retiring board, Yale's President James Rowland Angell had sly fun asking the News who started Yale's building boom, anyway. He recalled, he said, that the Yale Record (funny fortnightly) had treated itself to a handsome home three years ago. And now the grave News had received and that day had dedicated a new plant of its own. Point was added to President Angell's fun by the fact that the Record, to support its building, was reported to be vending oysters and liquid refreshment. And the News, though Its new home was an outright gift, had instantly announced it needed an endowment fund for upkeep.

President Angell left his fun with the observation that he was anything but disapproving of the new News building since it, like much else that is new at Yale, is a memorial. It was erected by the contributions of 272 friends and admirers of the late Briton Hadden, Yale 1920, acting chairman of the News in the War year 1917-18, chairman 1919-20, onetime star reporter on the late great New York World, co-Founder and Editor of TIME.

Architects Lewis Greenleaf Adams & Thurlow Merrill Prentice of the Briton Hadden Memorial had little ground to work on but they stretched that little far to house the "Oldest College Daily" (founded 1878). Plunked down where it belongs, on a corner central to Yale's ramified, citified campus, the building rises three neat stories in a Gothic style. Downstairs is a spacious heelers' room papered in old issues of the News, Running around the four walls of this room is a wide work-desk of oak, thick enough to withstand the initial-carving of generations of heelers. Downstairs also are business offices. On staggered levels off the stairs (to save hall space) are editors' rooms and the morgue. Upstairs is a library dominated by Painter Donald M. Campbell Jr.'s portrait of Briton Hadden as he looked in action (see cut)--coat off, green visor on, big red TIME pencil firmly grasped.

A characterization of Briton Hadden was given by John Stuart Martin, present Managing Editor of TIME. Excerpts:

"The story of TIME'S origin and growth is pretty well known, especially to all of us at this memorial ceremony. But I am not sure the underlying conception of the Newsmagazine, so far as Brit Hadden was concerned, is so well known. He phrased it, as he phrased everything, with arresting bluntness. He said: 'People talk too much about things they don't know.' As a boy in school, as a man in college, he felt that general information, the simplest, central facts about all sorts of subjects in which people were interested, from American History to cooking and from golf to astronomy, were not nearly so handy a part of the average person's equipment as common sense said they should be. He observed that people talked at great length but with astonishing vagueness and inaccuracy. . . .

"He felt news needed organizing into sharply defined departments. More, it needed simplifying, abbreviating, so that the significant facts and the colorful de tails would stand out and be seen. . [He also] wrote into the prospectus that TIME would be edited in the historical spirit. It would be a magazine for those who came late to the human ball game, even for a man from Mars, with a succinct account of what happened in the opening innings, in what town, league, country and year the game was being played, and with a few hints, as polite and helpful as possible, on the players, rules and tricks of the game. To keep this attitude from resulting, as it might have done, in tedious pedantry, was one of the major editorial problems. It called for writing of a most vivid and original kind. It also necessitated the complete elimination of bias and prejudice. This new historian must have perspective and complete objectivity. His attitude must be, as it has since been defined, that of the Man in the Moon at the end of the current century. . . .

"The other day I asked a man who used to write a department for TIME in its early days, what he best remembered about Brit as an editor. He replied: 'Well, I think the most impressive thing was his ability to grasp instantly the largest ideas, even when they were wholly foreign to him. And his capacity for sticking to such ideas until they had been set down clearly with illuminating, readable detail. Nothing was too much trouble for him.' . . He worked, as everyone now knows, fnuch too hard, really. He wore himself haggard in those early days when the entire reference library would be lugged over Monday night to the printing shop on 12th Avenue and Brit would stay there, often until long after Tuesday sunrise, correcting messy page proofs, catching factual errors, improving captions or footnotes, fitting important stories into impossibly small spaces, putting into the magazine everything he had before the final press deadline came. . . .

''That late press routine kept up even through the days in Cleveland, long after TIME was an established success and a mechanical staff had been trained to take up some of the drudgery. It was Brit's enormous capacity for drudgery and detail as well as the inspiration of his original mind, which won him the complete loyalty and affection of his staff. Once he had an office boy named William. William was not a brilliant boy, but he was smart enough to understand the spirit of the office, and young enough to exaggerate it almost comically. 'Mr. Hadden' became his god. William hated to leave at night. Probably he wouldn't have left if Brit hadn't told him he should go to night school. One day when Brit was not in the office and someone called William to do a chore, he uttered a remark that became an office classic. He was sitting in his cubby-hole among the piled up out-of-town newspapers. Instead of coming out at once when called, he answered: 'I am busy.'

"'What are you doing?' he was asked.

"At that he came out holding up one of the fat TIME pencils. Very seriously, almost severely, he said: "I am sharpening a great pencil for a great man!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.