"Never Be Afraid"

Joseph Pulitzer Jr. got no prizes from his famed prize-giving father. His chief physical inheritance was the old man's bad eyes (Pulitzer Sr. was so blind that for the last 20 years of his life secretaries read the paper to him). Financially, he inherited only one-tenth of the Pulitzer publishing estate. Brothers Ralph (now dead) and Herbert got the prize, the late, great New York World, and lost it. Joe got the backwater St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

This week, Joseph Pulitzer Jr., publisher of a newspaper that is now considered one of the nation's half-dozen best, invited his 1,152 staff members, and about a hundred Post-Dispatch alumni, to come to his 60th birthday party (champagne, breast of chicken, speeches).

Lights Out. The alumni, for whom 40 rooms were reserved at St. Louis' Hotel Jefferson, ranged from Communist Robert Minor to elegant, man-about-Manhattan Herbert Bayard Swope. They rolled into St. Louis--on Pulitzer's money and no encouragement from the ODT--from all parts of the U.S. The P-D's No. 1 alumnus, aloof, astute Oliver Kirby ("O.K.") Bovard, 72, managing editor for 28 of the P-D's greatest years, was ill and sent regrets.

P-D admirers usually credit its special virtues to Bovard, or to the present trio of top men: cocky, trigger-tempered Ralph Coghlan, editorial-page chief; moose-tall, desk-pounding Managing Editor Benjamin Harrison Reese; Cartoonist Daniel Fitzpatrick. They were, indeed, all on the team that carried through the P-D's most successful crusades: the Teapot Dome exposure, the impeachment of Federal Judge English, the Union Electric Co. slush-fund scandal, the 1936 registration frauds. But Pulitzer has backed them, ignoring the protests of his country-club friends.

What has kept him to the P-D's vigorously crusading ways is a more-than-filial admiration of Pulitzer Sr. and all he stood for. Each year, on the anniversary of the elder Pulitzer's death, presses stop and lights go out for one minute. Busts of the Hungarian immigrant boy who became one of journalism's greats adorn the P-D building. And the platform that Pulitzer Sr. wrote is repeated each day atop the editorial page: "Always fight demagogues of all parties . . . never be satisfied with merely printing news . .. . never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

Reading by Ear. Like his father, ramrod-straight, close-cropped Joseph Pulitzer Jr. has eyes so weak that he can read only headlines. Two secretaries spend five to seven hours a day reading to him; his wife takes over in the evening. He conscientiously keeps up with plays and books which have a chance for Pulitzer Prizes. Sixteen weeks of the year he spends in a rented cottage at Bar Harbor, Me., duck-hunting in the Ozarks or fishing in Quebec --but keeps in telephone contact with his editors, and peppers them with yellow memos. Blind in one eye, and able to see only silhouettes with the other, he shoots only when a duck is outlined in the sky, fishes, like anybody else, by waiting for the tug. On his Ozark trips, Cartoonist Fitzpatrick, 54, often goes along.

Slim, deceptively mild Cartoonist Fitzpatrick fell out with Pulitzer's politics in 1936, when the PD, after publishing a dozen of Fitz's anti-Landon cartoons, came out against Roosevelt (it supported F.D.R. again, however, in '40 and '44). Fitz, refusing to draw pro-Landon cartoons, more or less expected to be fived. But Pulitzer only remarked to him: "Sorry you couldn't go along with us." Fitz, a P-D man for 31 years, summed up last week: "Hell, I wouldn't last a week with Hearst. This paper is run as near like a democracy should be run as anything I know of."

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