"It's Ours!"

The big news was phoned to Assistant City Editor Bob Stayman. He slammed down his phone, jumped up and shouted the length of the Cincinnati Enquirer's city room: "The paper's ours!" Staffers stopped working, began hugging one another, shaking hands and dancing between their desks. A photographer scooted out, ran all over the building shouting ecstatically, "It's ours, it's ours." Every place he went, the words touched off a celebration. The staffers had good reason to celebrate. For $7,600,000 they had bought their newspaper from Washington's American Security & Trust Co., trustee of the 111-year-old Enquirer since the death of Owner John McLean in 1916.

Clean Break. The Enquirer employees' committee, with the financial backing of Cleveland Financier Cyrus Eaton, had beaten out the Taft-owned Cincinnati Times-Star, which had expected to buy the Enquirer unopposed (TIME, Jan. 14 et seq.). Last week, in a complicated deal, Washington's district court approved the sale to Eaton, through his Portsmouth Steel Corp., for $7,600,000. Eaton turned the paper over to a new corporation, Cincinnati Enquirer, Inc., set up by the employees. Portsmouth Steel will hold two notes for $6,350,000 and $1,250,000 until they are paid off by the employees through a bond issue underwritten by Halsey, Stuart & Co., investment bankers, and a stock issue backed by Cincinnati brokers.

Eaton's role as an angel, said Reporter . Jim Ratliff, who led the employees' committee, will "end in a clean break as soon as we pay him off." Eaton, a political enemy of Senator Bob Taft, will be paid a fee (estimated at $250,000) for his financing help, may get it in stock if the employees so decide. Said Ratliff, "The paper's in our hands. Eaton will not control us now or then."

The Enquirer's new employee board plans no changes in the prosperous paper. Its boss will continue to be Roger H. Ferger, publisher and now also president of the new corporation. Even the Enquirer's support of Senator Taft for the Republican nomination will continue. "This wasn't a revolt of employees," explained Ratliff. "It was a movement to preserve a famous independent newspaper."

Sour Grapes. The day of the court's decision, the Times-Star ran a sour-grapes editorial. Said the paper: "The Times-Star did not anticipate any such controversy .. . The cost of production has gone steadily up, and newspaper earnings have gone considerably down. Ownership of the Enquirer lost a great deal of its attractiveness for us." But Scripps-Howard's Cincinnati Post, the city's third daily, doffed its hat to Ratliff's committee. Said the Post: "What many of us had thought could not happen, did happen. This show of enterprise . . . by a band of newspaper employees must be regarded as little short of phenomenal."

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