Phoenician Invasion

Restless, acquisitive Eugene C. Pulliam, a onetime police reporter on the Kansas City Star, has always hankered to be a big publisher. Since 1917 he has bought 43 midwest papers, sold 35 of them. Mostly the deals were just for practice, but he was playing for keeps when he bought control of the Indianapolis Star (for $2,500,000) in 1944. Last week Publisher Pulliam, a crew-cropped six-footer, pulled his biggest deal of all. In bustling Phoenix (Ariz.) he bought the Republic (circ. 56,810) and Gazette (33,494), a money-making mo-- nopoly. Price: $4.000,000 cash. Agent: burly Smith Davis, newspaper broker who is usually around when sizable papers change hands (TIME, April 2, 1945).

Under their previous owners, the Phoenician twins had tried to work both sides of the street in heavily Democratic Arizona, although they obviously preferred the Republican side. Kansas-born Gene Pulliam likes that side, too; in Indianapolis he has been an active GOPromoter. As secretary-treasurer of his new Phoenix Newspapers, Inc., he listed "N. G. Mason," who is Mrs. Naomi Mason Pulliam. "Nina" Pulliam was his secretary for 15 years, has been his wife for five, once ran his Indianapolis radio station, WIRE.

Another husband-&-wife team, John and Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, who bought Phoenix's weekly Shopping News in February, had just announced a small expansion of their own. Rechristened the Arizona Times, their throwaway now comes out twice a week. When it will grow into a daily they have not said, but one thing goes without saying: it will not be a Republican paper.

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