The Captain's Daughter

Her father told her she was making a big mistake, and he should have known. The late Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, the moody genius who had made his raucous New York Daily News the biggest U.S. newspaper, said that the suburbs of New York City wouldn't go for a tabloid "home paper." But daughter Alicia Patterson Guggenheim had the stubborn streak of all the Medill clan. Eight years ago, in a drafty garage at Hempstead, L.I., she started the tabloid Newsday, to prove her father wrong.

Last week she had a cracking success on her hands. Already blanketing 64 Long Island towns, Newsday invaded the Huntington area* with a special edition, to cover more of the polo-playing, big-spending North Shore. The paper was carrying more ads than any Manhattan evening paper, and running in the black.

Alicia had been forced to do it without benefit of the habit-forming comic strips that helped popularize the Daily News. But she had another asset: her newspaper know-how learned at her father's knee.

Poor Little Rich Girl. "I used to ride with him, fly with him, fish with him, and just shoot the breeze with him.," she says. She grew up with a fiercely loyal admiration for him. At 19, just out of fashionable Foxcroft School, she went to work as a $30-a-week cub on the Daily News.

Later she dropped from the sight of her socialite friends, called herself "Agnes Homberg," and spent months as a cashier, department-store detective and salesgirl. What she found out ran in Liberty magazine, then owned by her father and Cousin Bertie McCormick, as a series on how to get a job. She was married twice in her 20s, to James Simpson Jr., son of a onetime board chairman of Marshall Field & Co., and to Broker-Aviator Joseph W. Brooks, and divorced them.

At 33, married for the third time, brown-haired Alicia was a competent pilot, a Daily News book reviewer, and childless. She was also bored; she wanted a paper of her own, not to make money (she still draws no salary) but as an outlet for her restless energy. She talked her husband, Harry Frank Guggenheim, of the wealthy copper and nitrate family, into putting up the cash. It cost him, eventually, $750,000. Newsday, out of the red for two years, is now paying him back.

"I was awful green," Alicia reflects. "And it was a 100-to-1 shot." The newspaper she created is no carbon copy of the Daily News. Its front page is loud, but inside pages are made up like a magazine, with every item dummied to the last line of type. She hates the tabloid habit of marooning bits of news among seas of ads. Newsday's ads don't get in the way of full columns of Long Island news, and the advertisers have learned to like it.

Family Arguments. "We are not part of the McCormick-Patterson axis," says Alicia shortly. "We're really independent. We can attack anybody we want, because we don't want anything from anybody." In 1940, when Alicia was for F.D.R. and her husband for Wendell Willkie, they argued it out on the editorial page. Now there is no argument; both are for Dewey. She also broke with her father, editorially, on his isolationism. Newsday looks with favor on ECA, and, like its commuting readers, with impatience on the Long Island railroad.

Small (5 ft. 3 in.) and expensively dressed, "Miz Patterson" (as her staff calls her) keeps a purposeful brown eye on everything from editorial cartoons to finishing touches on Newsday's new plant in Garden City, L.I. She works in her small office off the city room from 10:30 a.m. to cocktail time. From the vast Guggenheim chateau at Port Washington or their bandbox house in Manhattan, her deceptively lazy drawl often calls pink-cheeked Managing Editor Alan Hathway, a Daily News alumnus, at any hour of the night.

This month, with Newsday hitting the street on clockwork schedule, Miz Patterson will sail for Europe and a spell of reporting. With her will go her friend, Publisher Dorothy Thackrey of the New Dealing, pro-Zionist New York Post. Alicia has plenty of plans to keep her busy when she gets back. The Guggenheims are going into radio at Bridgeport, Conn., and some day Alicia would like to surround New York City with Newsdays in Westchester and New Jersey. "There are a few papers here & there," she says with a predatory glint, "that I'd like to compete with."

*Whose weekly Long Islander was founded in 1838 by Walt Whitman.

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