100,000 Nickels Wanted

By its own admission, Manhattan's pink knight among newspapers, the hyperthyroid tabloid PM, has everything it takes to be a great newspaper--except readers. Its 165,000 nickel-a-day "shareholders" (over 200,000 pay a dime on Sundays) make up a weekly $60,000 pot, but each week some bills go unpaid. For most of PM's six years, Marshall Field has been standing off the sheriff. Some weeks the gesture cost him $40,000. By last week, founder-editor Ralph Ingersoll's* pamphleteering paper had set back his benefactor $4,318,000 and the end was not yet in sight. Said Field pointedly: "I won't do it forever."

From Washington came another jolt for Editor Ingersoll. In a climax to old differences (TIME, April 22) and recent editorial labor troubles, five of his six Capital staffers resigned in a body. Young (30), bright James Wechsler, ex-bureau head, was one. Another was able, balding Nathan Robertson, with 23 years of Washington experience behind him. (Field on Robertson: "A damned good man; I hate to lose him.") Both had been with PM from the start. Said the five in a signed statement: ". . . We cannot in good conscience continue to work for Ralph Ingersoll. . . . His illiberalism and intolerance have offended many people. ... He has repeatedly 'pushed other people around.' . . . Although not himself a Communist, he has continuously yielded to Communist pressure. . . . We especially regret any embarrassment our action may cause to Marshall Field, an honest and courageous American."

No Life Saver. Ingersoll plugged the Washington hole with a makeshift staff. To the 165,000 faithful, he had already prepared an appeal which he distributed this week. Said he: PM needs 100,000 new readers. In a PM-size, twelve page "Prospectus," Ingersoll blew the cap on PM's crisis-ridden history, in which he emerged as a combination Job and St. George of modern journalism.

After dreaming up and dummying up PM in 1939 ("an all-star cast of friends" like Heywood Broun, Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman helped get out the first dry runs), Ingersoll began scouring the country for an angel. Once he almost found one in Life Saver Tycoon Edward Noble. They were set to sign the next day. That day Hitler marched into Poland and Noble decided not to march into any risky investments. Ingersoll finally found 16 backers who would "gamble with $100,000 chips," but money petered out, and he talked Field into carrying the whole debt.

In the meantime, Captain Joe Patterson, always alert to potential competitors for his Daily News, had run PM off the New York stands. "It's kind of like hazing a new boy," said Patterson, taking free cuts in the air (with a boy's baseball bat, when Ingersoll went to call on him).

Not for Sour Apples. Ingersoll admits that his adless Great Experiment (a first-issue sellout) grew tiresome: "Someone on Broadway cracked, 'PM's a paper gotten out by young fogies.' Everybody giggled . . . the public didn't like it for sour apples." By August, 1940, the "faithful" had slumped to a paltry 31,000 in a city of 7 1/2 million. Since then, PM has had its ups & downs, has enjoyed occasional dizzying forays into the black.

To get out of the red, PM had considered raising its price ("at a time when PM was campaigning all-out to keep prices down!") and taking ads. PM no longer argued that ads were sinister ("most people like to read ads"), but only that its press equipment was not up to expanding to an ad-filled paper. Just give him a few hundred thousand more nickels a day, pleaded crusader Ingersoll, and he'll not only put out a bigger and better PM--he'll build up a whole chain of them.

* For other news of Editor Ingersoll, see MILESTONES.

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