Lend-Lease

Reading the ultra-Tory London Daily Mail last week, Londoners chuckled at a sprightly story by a reporter who wanted to buy a bicycle and found himself snarled in the paper work of Laborite bureaucracy. The headline was of a familiar pattern:

ONE GREEN BIKE AND LOTS OF RED TAPE.

But to Mail readers, the byline was unfamiliar: "By Mark Ethridge Jr." It was the foreign debut of the 26-year-old son of the publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times.

A Princeton graduate, Mark Jr. has never worked for his father's newspapers. He broke in on the Washington Post. For the last 2 1/2 years, he has been a reporter and then a music and drama critic for the Winston-Salem, N.C. Journal. Six months ago, Publisher Ethridge decided that his son ought to "cram as much experience into his skull" as it would hold. He persuaded Viscount Rothermere, publisher of the Daily Mail, to try an experiment in lend-lease. In return for Rothermere's hiring Mark Jr. on a temporary basis, Publisher Ethridge agreed to hire a Daily Mailman. As of last week, Lord Rothermere had not yet picked his man, so Trader Ethridge still had the best of the bargain.

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