A Home for the Sun

Marshall Field, who has money to burn, was in a buying mood again. Last week, jingling a pocketful of change, he went shopping for a second Chicago newspaper. He put a $5,339,000 check in the bank and invited the 488 stockholders of the tabloid Chicago Times to come & get it. He was offering $60 a share for stock that was quoted at $37.

Field didn't need the afternoon Times so much as he needed a place to print his morning Sun. Since it began, six years ago, the Sun has been a paying guest of the Chicago Daily News. At first, everything was fine. Marshall Field's Sun was out to wear down Bertie McCormick's monolithic Tribune. Always happy to stick an irritating finger in McCormick's glacial eye, the late Colonel Frank Knox quartered the Sun in his spacious Daily News plant, let it use his presses at night and was nice about the rent. Hardheaded John S. Knight later took over the Daily News, but not its feuds. He played footie with McCormick; and as a landlord saw no reason to charge the Sun less than the traffic would bear. Last year he tripled Field's $353,000-a-year rent.

When he gets the Times, Field plans to make the Sun a tab too and put out a joint Sunday edition called the Sun-Times. Field will find the Times (circ. 474,000) a paper that sees things his own, New Dealing way, under the guidance of an able, deceptively benign-looking publisher named Richard James Finnegan. The Times has been profitable, which is more than the Sun can say. The Sun will lose its sour-faced executive editor, E. Z. ("Dimmy") Dimitman, whom Field imported from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Dimmy never did have much use for his boss's earnest crusades, and he has less use for tabs. His successor (with the title of managing editor): James Mulroy, who as a Daily News police reporter won a Pulitzer Prize for cracking the Loeb-Leopold murder case.

Marshall Field was already talking as if the Times were his, and presumably it soon would be. Said Field, who could have bought the Times for a fourth as much money (around $15 a share) at the time he started the Sun: "I was thinking in terms of a full-size newspaper then. Maybe it was dumb of me. Now I've changed my mind. I think the tabloid is the coming thing."

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