Sooner Back to Sooners

Joseph A. Brandt, a rawboned, red-haired Indianan, is a character straight out of The Front Page. His family wanted him to be a preacher, but by the time he had worked his way through the University of Oklahoma and got three degrees from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, he had decided to be a newspaperman. Returning to Oklahoma, he shortly became city editor of the Tulsa Tribune. Then the fur began to fly.

When a big story broke, City Editor Brandt leaped from desk top to desk top, shouting assignments. One day a blonde named Sallye Little walked into his office. Brandt liked her spirit, hired her as a reporter. Soon they began to argue at the top of their voices, throw inkpots and pastepots at each other. Sallye quit, went to work for the opposition Tulsa World. Thereupon Brandt married her.

In 1928 Joseph Brandt quit the Tribune and took a new job as head of the University of Oklahoma Press. He ran the Press like a city room. Instead of waiting for professors to bring him their ponderous research, he went hunting for interesting authors. Once he chased an author across the continent in a plane to get him to write a book. The book. Wah'Kon-Tah, by John Joseph Mathews, was the first from any university press to be chosen a Book-of-the-Month. After he had turned out several best-sellers at Oklahoma, the Princeton University Press nabbed him two years ago. Brandt told Princeton professors how to write readable stuff, last year had six of his books recommended by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Among them was Chip Off My Shoulder, which he wheedled out of Scripps-Howard's Thomas L. Stokes.

Last fortnight the University of Oklahoma Regents elected this prodigious character as the university's president. First Oklahoma alumnus to hold the office (salary: $10,000), 41 -year-old Joseph Brandt, a Lutheran, will succeed BaptistBible-collecting William Bennett Bizzell next August. Oklahoma's Sooners (named for the settlers who rushed into the Territory sooner than the zero hour in 1889) are tough. Few years ago six Sooner athletes caused a scandal by flogging a campus newspaper correspondent whose dispatches they did not like. Last week the consensus was that Sooners would think twice before trying such tricks on rawboned, red-haired Joseph Brandt.

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