The Unretired Crusader

The new professor, refreshed in spirit by 30 minutes at the piano and his Bach fugues, expertly curbed his dark blue Jaguar outside Mason Hall, on the University of Michigan campus. Inside, 20 undergraduate journalists had mustered for his course on editorial writing. Thus last week, after 43 years of newspapering, began a new career for Carl E. Lindstrom, 62, retired executive editor of the Hartford. Conn. Times (circ. 120,161), and a discerning lifelong critic of the U.S. press.

In this critical sense it was not a new career at all, but a postscript to four decades of preaching as well as practicing good journalism. For Newspaperman Lindstrom, no audience was too small or too large--a single Times reporter or the American Society of Newspaper Editors, of which Lindstrom was long an officer. Before such listeners and before lecture audiences the country over, he took clear and frequent aim at the challenges and weaknesses of his own profession:

REPORTING: "A story is not a story when you have assembled a group of facts. You have to get to the heart of it."

WRITING: "The news writer is an artist. In its simplest terms, art is the business of selecting for effect--plus skill. The writer is the creative manipulator of the most plastic, the most resistant, the most mercurial and yet the stickiest substance known to man--the written word."

EDITING: "What you leave out is always much more important than what you leave in. A sculptor achieves a work of art by what he chips out of the marble; if he left the marble merely as he found it, what would he accomplish?"

DEADLINES : "We are prisoners of the newsroom clock. It is crowding us farther off the narrow edge of journalism to which we cling and into the pit of entertainment, circulation gimmicks and advertising reader notices."

CONTENT: "The press as a whole tends to neglect people's cultural interests. There is too little attention paid to the arts, education, religion."

THE FREE PRESS: "We have a reasonably free press in this country, but there are far too many captive editors who cannot even be heard to rattle their chains."

EDITORIAL POLICY: "But after all, a newspaper is a piece of property, and the owner has a right to say what he wants."

Son of a Wallace, Mich. Lutheran minister, Carl Lindstrom aspired to be a concert pianist, gave that up as a boy when a dislocation permanently stiffened one arm. He left Beloit College for economic reasons, after one year, wandered through jobs on small-town papers to the Hartford Times in 1917 as a copyreader. A self-taught linguist, Lindstrom makes nightly entries in diaries in six languages, frequently translates news stories into Italian, French, German, Spanish or Swedish just for the exercise. He reads multilingually and voraciously--75 books a year. He takes pride in a connoisseur's cellar of fine wines, never misses a Brigitte Bardot movie (he has persuaded himself that she can act).

"I feel I have put out about all the newspapers there are in me," said Lindstrom, in explanation of his departure, three years before formal retirement age, from the Times. Some of his associates think there were other reasons. Last spring he wrote an editorial in the American Editor criticizing some publishers in one-newspaper towns for being too much concerned about profits and too little concerned about getting out a good newspaper. In reply. Frank E. Tripp, board chairman of the Gannett Newspapers, who was in effect Lindstrom's top boss, wrote a scathing letter to Editor & Publisher, attacking the editorial. A short time later Lindstrom, who defends a newspaper's need to make a profit but has taken note of the press's "almost psychopathic sensitiveness to criticism," decided to accept a standing offer from Michigan. There Carl Lindstrom can go on preaching the gospel of good journalism, and to his favorite audience: tomorrow's newsmen.

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