Island Editor

In Manhattan last week a tall, lean, 67-year-old Scotsman named R(obert) McCulloch Dick called at the National City Bank, picked up a big bundle of newspapers, hurried to his hotel to comb them word by word. After a sojourn in London he was catching up on five months' back reading of his own paper, the weekly Philippines Free Press. Presently, reading one of his dispatches from London, he was engulfed by gloom because his paper had gone to pot--he had found a typographical error.

Far from pot, the Philippines Free Press, with circulation at 39,400, is one of the most successful, best-edited English-language papers in the Philippines.

Filipinos (who constitute 75% of its readers) are its stanch supporters. In a format resembling the Satevepost, it includes a capable foreign-news section, feature articles, political gossip, Washington correspondence.

But the Free Press is not so enviable as its editor. Born in Edinburgh, educated in the U.S. (at Missouri's Park College), young Scotsman Dick got typhoid fever and was told by a doctor that sea air might keep his hair from falling out. So he shipped on a windjammer to Hong Kong, drifted to the Manila Times. Later he returned to the U.S., but after a freezing winter in Manhattan he went back to Manila for good. Said he: "I can make a living in New York if I have to--but I don't have to." In 1908, for one peso (50-c-), he bought name, good will and subscription list of a defunct weekly. In the beginning he was its entire editorial and business staff. He upset the American colony (and once was threatened with deportation) because he insisted on giving Filipinos their just dues in U.S.-Filipino squabbles. But the Free Press soon gained a respectful audience.

All that was long ago, and Editor Dick, still a bachelor, is now a fixture in Manila. The sea voyage did no permanent good. He wears a toupee abroad (in the Philippines it is too hot). At 50 he relaxed the temperance pledge given his mother, now drinks occasional light wines. He also relaxed his golf from 36 holes three times a week to 18 holes. But he is still a walking edition of Bartlett's Quotations, still a perfectionist in grammar, spelling, punctuation. (Result of this finickiness is a shining absence in the Free Press of the bamboo English that creeps into most Far Eastern English-language papers.) Moreover, he intends to run his paper as long as he lives and will it to his second-in-command, F. Theo. Rogers, and to his staff. He doesn't think that either war with Japan or Philippines independence in 1946 will interfere with that plan.

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