Up from the Morgue

On the city-room bulletin board one day last week, New York Times reporters saw and were startled by a small but significant notice. For the first time in 21 years, the Times had a new city editor.

Quiet-spoken David Joseph, 61, who liked to go home before the sun went down and the first edition came up (TIME, June 28), had been made assistant managing editor. Into Joseph's job went able, cool Robert Garst, 47, who intends to keep.the same hours as most of his 150 reporters (2 to 11 p.m.). One sensible and (for the Times') revolutionary result: the new city editor would read his staff's stories before they went into the morning paper, see the finished Times before its subscribers did.

Man from Virginia. Lanky, red-haired Bob Garst is all newspaperman; marriage, remarked a friend last week, is about his only hobby (his wife used to edit the Times's letters column). A Virginian, Garst first worked for the Times as a morgue clerk while studying at Columbia's School of Journalism ('24). He has been on the Times news staff for 23 years, for the past two years as assistant night managing editor. In his spare time, Garst wrote (with Timesman Ted Bernstein) a widely used manual on copyreading, Headlines and Deadlines, and taught journalism at Columbia.

Garst is as methodical as a metronome, and as unexcitable. City-room staffers clock him in every day: hanging up his hat & coat at 5:20 p.m., putting them on again at exactly 12:05 a.m. Some times during the evening he looks up, summons one cf the city-room waiters and orders a sandwich and glass of milk from the cafeteria. Reporters like the way Garst seeks their judgment on a story's value (Garst: "How much space do you want to give it?"), respect the quick but never superficial reading he gives their copy, admire his calm in a news crisis. Said Star Reporter Meyer Berger last week: "A damn good executive."

Man from Mississippi. Along with Garst's promotion, the Times also shuffled five other news executives around--but brought in no new faces. Most important change: amiable, Mississippi-born Assistant Managing Editor Turner Catledge, who has spent 18 of his 47 years on the Times, moved up to acting managing editor. He will replace Edwin L. James, who sailed last week for a long vacation in Europe.*

* For news of another Straight, see MILESTONES.

* But not to start a Paris edition of the Times, as rumor had it. The Times gave up that idea two months ago. Said Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger: "There's not going to be a Paris edition, there's not going to be a Berlin edition, there's not going to be a London edition, there's not going to be a Peking edition."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.