Western Story

City rooms of western newspapers clacked with rumors about John and Anna Boettiger. Some rumors: they would go into business against their old employer, Hearst, in Seattle; they were dickering in Portland with Marshall Field money; Field would stake them in San Diego. Last week the big gossip anticlimaxed into a small fact. Franklin Roosevelt's rangy daughter and her strapping husband had bought the Phoenix (Ariz.) Shopping News, an advertising throwaway. The reported price: $15,000 (theirs, not Field's).

Big John Boettiger strode into the newsroom of the Phoenix Republic and Gazette, thrust a handout at a reporter. It said that Anna and he would "gradually" develop the newsless shoppers' weekly into a daily paper. It did not say (or need to) that John and Anna hope to break the Republic and Gazette's profitable monopoly. The Republic called itself the Republican until 1930, still talks like one; the Gazette, under the same ownership, is only a little more polite to Democrats. The New Dealing Boettigers obviously hoped to capitalize on one fact of life in Arizona: the state is lopsidedly (7-to-1) Democratic.

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