Hearst's Howey

"When a Hearst paper gets sick, they call me in, and I make it sicker."

Thus last week Walter Howey tossed aside the news that he had been called in to doctor the New York Mirror, sick Hearst tabloid. There was a polite little announcement by General Director Arthur Brisbane, who dug down in his bag of trick titles, pulled one out marked "news adviser" for Walter Howey. But what Director Brisbane did not say about "News Adviser" Howey would fill a bang-up book, had already tilled a feverish play, The Front Page. For Walter Howey is the man Playwrights Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur had in mind when they presented the character Walter Burns--the tough, smooth Chicago managing editor who stole the dead woman's stomach from the coroner's physician to prove she was poisoned; who scooped the town on a jailbreak, caught the mayor in skulduggery, shanghaied his ace reporter from his honeymoon all in three dizzy acts.

As city editor of the Chicago Tribune, later as managing editor of Hearst's Herald & Examiner during the most rough-&-tumble era of Chicago journalism, Walter Howey was a profane romanticist, ruthless but not cruel, unscrupulous but endowed with a private code of ethics. He was the sort of newsman who managed to have hell break loose right under his feet, expected similar miracles from his underlings, rewarded them generously. Undersized, unprepossessing, he was afraid of nothing.

Born 53 years ago in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Walter Howey was ousted from Blee's Military Academy at St. Joseph, Mo. for selling his horse. His family next sent him to Chicago Art Institute. Following a few nonproductive months, Walter pocketed what remained of his tuition money, chartered a small steamer, took the student body on a rollicking cruise of the Great Lakes. Back in Fort Dodge he persuaded his father to get him a job on the local paper. He loved it, swelled with pride when his weekly wage was raised from $5 to $10, finally to $15. Not until long afterward did his father tartly inform him that he had paid the wage from his own pocket. But Reporter Howey made his way to the Des Moines Daily Capital (defunct), thence on to Chicago.

A cub on Chicago's City Press Association, Howey was walking to City Hall to cover a routine meeting one winter day in 1903, when he saw smoke seeping from the Iroquois Theatre. Up through a sidewalk grating crawled a blackened figure in stage costume, then another & another. They gasped a few words about the carnage inside. Cub Howey dashed into a saloon next door, telephoned his editor (who was certain Howey was drunk), paid the bartender $5 to tie up the telephone, one of the few in the neighborhood. When the day was over, boxcar headlines were screaming "736 DEAD."

In a few years Reporter Howey was city editor of the Chicago Inter-Ocean, founded by Charles T. Yerkes as a political houseorgan for that tycoon's traction schemes. When the paper had done its job, Yerkes presented it to his editor, George Wheeler Hinman, with an electric light plant in the Loop for good measure to pay the paper's bills. Into office went Mayor Fred A. Busse, good friend of the Chicago Tribune and of Samuel Insull, who wanted the competing Hinman light plant eliminated. When Mayor Busse started to put the Hinman plant out of business, Publisher Hinman assigned Walter Howey to dig up dirt on the Mayor. Two months of burglary, bribery, and tireless sleuthing by Digger Howey filled a black suitcase with material which was spread in the Inter-Ocean. Shortly thereafter Mayor Busse died suddenly.

Despite its backing of Mayor Busse, the Tribune was so impressed by Digger Howey that it hired him as city editor at four times his old salary. There he distinguished himself by ridding Chicago of a horde of quack doctors specializing in venereal disease. His strategy was to send out, as a prospective "patient," a reporter who had a clean bill of health from a reputable physician. In the reporter's pocket would be a savings bankbook showing a modest balance. The "patient" would tearfully confess to the quack that he was about to be married but had reason to suspect that he had been exposed to gonorrhea. With his clothes left in an anteroom where the doctor's assistant could easily find and examine the bankbook, the reporter underwent an examination. In every case the doctor gravely told him he was indeed badly infected. Price of a cure invariably conformed with the bankbook balance. It made a devastating series for the Tribune.

In the third year of the European War Howey, attracted by William Randolph Hearst's isolationist policy concerning the U. S., went over to the Herald & Examiner as managing editor. On the Herex city desk was a battery of telephones, one painted white. When the white one rang, a desk editor seized it in a flash. It was a private wire from a police department switchboard, whose operators were on Howey's secret payroll. Detectives never could understand why they nearly always found Herex newshawks at a crime scene before them.

In recent years Editor Howey helped start the New York Mirror (TIME, Nov. 26), put the tabloid Boston Record firmly on its feet, upping circulation from 197,000 to 320,000, made a great deal of money in the stockmarket, took charge of Hearst's International News Photo Service. In the picture business Walter Howey shows his most surprising side. The books on his desk bear such titles as Solvents, Elements of Physical Chemistry, Colloidal Behavior, The Selenium Cell. Much of his time he spends on the seventh floor of the Mirror Building, behind a door marked "International Research Laboratories, Inc." There, with his staff of technicians, he has produced a machine to make a half-tone engraving in four minutes instead of the customary hour. Instead of the usual acid bath, the Howey machine employs a photoelectric eye which scans the photograph. The impulses from the electric eye actuate a cutting tool which etches the lights & shades of the picture into a revolving half-cylinder of metal (see cut. p. 33).

More astonishing is a device for wire transmission of news pictures, which may be Publisher Hearst's answer to the Associated Press's Wirephoto (TIME, April 29). The Hearst invention is portable, requires no leased wires, can be hooked up to any telephone. It resembles a conventional telephoto set in employing a tiny beam of light and photo-electric cell to scan the photograph. But the light impulses are converted into a shrill whistling sound. An ordinary telephone transmitter is clamped in place to catch the sound. At the receiving end of the telephone wire the waves are caught, re-converted into light which registers the picture on a sensitized plate. Total transmitting cost: the price of the telephone call.

As doctor to the Mirror, Walter Howey succeeds able Stanley Walker, whom Hearst hired away from the city desk of the New York Herald Tribune at a fancy price (TIME, Jan. 21). Hamstrung by the unfathomable Hearst way of doing things, Managing Editor Walker accomplished nothing, last week found himself transferred to the New York American. Meanwhile the Mirror remained the fourth largest newspaper in the land (circ. 560,000) and about the least respected.

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