Chicago Changes

Thirty-one years ago City Editor Henry Justin Smith of the Chicago Daily News took on a wide-eyed wholesale grocer's son fresh from Hyde Park High School, sent him out to get pictures of a bathing beauty contest. The cub, named Paul Scott Mowrer, assured himself of what was to prove a lifetime job by returning with a picture of each & every contestant. Last week a staff shuffle occasioned by the death of Managing Editor Smith (TIME, Feb. 17) left onetime Cub Mowrer, now baldish, stout, 48 and famed as a foreign correspondent, sitting in the chair of editor of the Daily News. The title was turned over to him by Publisher Frank Knox, peripatetic GOPossibility, who had held it since the retirement two years ago of longtime Editor Charles Henry Dennis.

Because he seemed too young for reporting, 17-year-old Paul Mowrer was set to writing features. He soon changed his mind about college, went off to study at University of Michigan, returned to his feature writing two years later. Next step up for a working journalist was to welcome visiting U. S. celebrities and watch local sheets for duels and other "color stories" as a foreign correspondent. When the News's Paris correspondent died in 1910, Paul Mowrer, then 22, got the job.

In 1914 Correspondent Mowrer dragged his scholarly young brother Edgar Ansel away from translating French metaphysicians in the Latin Quarter, made him the nucleus of his War staff. Then & there began the News tradition, in which Paul Mowrer has remained the chief figure, of extremely able foreign correspondence. Organized to report the War more swiftly than any other Chicago newspaper, the News's circulation shot up 100,000 in six months. Emerging from the War with a Legion of Honor ribbon, Paul Mowrer covered the Peace Conference, the Riffian campaigns of 1924, five disarmament conferences. When a Pulitzer Prize for best foreign correspondence of the year was set up in 1928, he got the first award. Meantime thick-mopped, pince-nezed Brother Edgar was making a corresponding name of his own in Berlin, writing a series of articles on the rise of Hitlerism which won him the double distinction of a Pulitzer Prize and expulsion from Germany (TIME, May 8, Sept. 18, 1933). He is now Paris correspondent of the News.

Paul Mowrer first met Publisher Knox at the London Economic Conference in 1933. After lunch at the Savoy they walked back to the News office where the publisher impressed his No. 1 correspondent by calling for abstracts of all dispatches on the Conference, reading for three hours straight without lifting his head. That the correspondent had also impressed his new employer was revealed the following year when Publisher Knox called him back to Chicago to be associate editor and chief editorial writer.

First worry of Editor Mowrer was what to do about the Tribune's attempt to undermine his final market edition by having Chicago's time set forward an hour (see p. 16). Such problems send him on long walks. With his second wife Hadley, the first Mrs. Ernest Hemingway, he lives quietly in an apartment on North State Street, spends many a winter evening writing poetry.

Since 1924 the Sunday circulation of the Louisville Courier-Journal has risen nearly 100,000. In six months last year the Sunday circulation of the Chicago Herald & Examiner, morning Hearstpaper, dropped nearly 100,000. Since 1924 Emanuel Levi, 46, has been vice president & general manager of the Courier-Journal at a reputed salary of $25,000 per year plus some $10,000 bonus. Last week Emanuel Levi was named publisher of the Herald & Examiner at a reputed $60,000 per year for the first three years, $75,000 for the next two.

"We are connected with the House of Rothschild, but we can't prove it," Emanuel Levi's Grandfather Rothschild used to say. Lawyer son of a Jewish pawnbroker, Publisher Levi has never written a newspaper line, had never been in a newspaper office until he went to help Robert W. Bingham run his newly-purchased Louisville Courier and Times in 1921. The Bingham properties have not had a bad year since. Daily circulation of the Courier has jumped from 48,000 to 102,000. that of the Times from 59,000 to 102,000. Meanwhile the Herald-Post lost $6,000,000 in five years and went bankrupt.

Emanuel Levi's recipe for newspaper success: "A damned good newspaper and a damned good circulation department."

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