Moving Speech

What young Harry Ashmore intended to do when he stood up before an editors' convention last spring, was to deglamorize the job of putting out a one-man editorial page. He succeeded instead in convincing some of his listeners that he knew his business. Last week, he had a bigger & better job.

As editor of the Charlotte, N.C. News (circ. 62,000), he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he had "no time for the contemplation of the navel . . . no desire to translate the editorial 'we' into the imperial 'we.' . . . The one-man editor is going to be guilty sometimes of bad and muddy writing. He must sometimes beat a hasty retreat into trivia if he wants to get home to dinner. If he confuses himself with the editorial staff of the New York Times, he is going to fill his page with half-baked opinions."

Amid the usual platitudes of an A.S.N.E. convention, Harry Ashmore's candor was refreshing. Oveta Gulp Hobby, wartime head of the WAC and executive editor of the Houston Post, turned to another editor and murmured: "I wish we had him on our staff." There were others who felt the same way. Soon Ashmore got flattering job offers from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Atlanta Journal and the Little Rock Arkansas Gazette.

For 45 years, the Gazette (which proudly calls itself the oldest paper west of the Mississippi) had been edited by 74-year-old John Netherland Heiskell. Ever since he lost his son in the war, Editor Heiskell has been looking around for a successor. When he heard Ashmore's speech, he decided he had found his man. This week, liberal, 31-year-old Harry Ashmore went to work as editorial-page editor for the Gazette (circ. 92,000), whose editor calls it "a conservative paper which sometimes disappoints conservatives." Explained Old Editor Heiskell: "I certainly didn't want to put an old man next in line for the editor's job; he might peg out before I did."

The youngest newsman to become a Nieman Fellow at Harvard (at 24), and a lieutenant colonel in the infantry at 28, Harry Ashmore is one of the South's most lucid and least chauvinistic editorialists. To replace him at Charlotte, the News picked 47-year-old William M. Reddig, literary and feature editor of the Kansas City Star. Bald Bill Reddig, an all-round newsman for 25 years, has a book about the Pendergast machine (Tom's Town) coming out in the fall. As a Democrat on a Republican paper, he always wanted to write editorials, jumped at the chance when the Democratic finger of the Charlotte News beckoned to him.

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