Push for the Post

From Caracas, the Houston Post's Reporter Jack Donahue last week sent his paper a penetrating series on a topic close to Texans: the precarious future of U.S. oil companies in post-revolutionary Venezuela. Hitting an even more sensitive nerve, the Post ran a Page One series by Staffer Leon Hale on Texas A. & M.'s deep-rooted schism over basic educational policies. Other staff-written stories in the bright, boldly laid-out Post last week ranged from Business Editor Sam Weiner's rundown on the recession's impact to Austin Correspondent Felton West's sympathetic account of a "constructive" program at an upstate reformatory once famed for stern treatment of juvenile inmates.

With such alert, far-ranging news coverage and a thoughtful, middle-of-the-road Republican editorial page, the morning Post ("written and edited to merit your confidence") has won 65-statewide and national journalistic awards in the past five years, staked out a reputation as the Southwest's most readable daily. It has also seized the rank of Houston's No. I paper from the staunchly segregationist evening Chronicle, which in its dyspeptic distrust of Eisenhower Republicanism, the U.N., and U.S. allies often sounds like an oil-belt echo of the Chicago Tribune.

In circulation and advertising, Jesse Jones's Chronicle had long towered over its rivals as commandingly as Jones's San Jacinto Monument* bestrides its battlefield. For the first time in more than 20 years, the Post (circ. 213,198) last October inched ahead of the windy, lethargic Chronicle (212.641,) in weekday circulation (though the Chronicle still has a strapping 14,000 Sunday lead).

The push at the Post/- comes from plump, stogie-chomping Executive Editor (and Board Member) Arthur Emmett Laro, 46, whose first move on taking over as managing editor in 1947 was to fire twelve staffers. He got a free hand from his publishers, Texas' onetime (1917-20) Governor William P. Hobby and his wife, Oveta Gulp, wartime WAC commander and the nation's first (1953-55) Health, Education and Welfare Secretary. In ten years Laro has quadrupled his editorial staff (to 110) and kept Houston humming with such solidly documented exposes as hawk-faced City Editor Ralph O Leary's biting inside report on Texas' McCarthy-phile Minute Women (TIME, Nov. 2, 1953). Editor Laro's creed: "Go beneath the surface of the news and report things that other people either aren't equipped to report--or don't want to."

*The world's tallest (570 ft.) stone monument, it was copied from a sketch in which Entrepreneur Jones combined his two favorite memorials: the Lincoln and Washington monuments in Washington, D.C.

/- Known earlier as the Houston Post-Dispatch, the paper successfully defended its right to that name in a court battle with Pulitzer's St. Louis Post-Dispatch, voluntarily shortened it in 1932.

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