Good for Kansas City

Each morning around 9:30, Roy Allison Roberts, his teeth clenching one of the dozen Corona-Coronas he smokes daily in defiance of his age (72) and his doctor (who allows him six), climbs out of his car before one of the homeliest buildings in Kansas City, Mo. The building quarters the Kansas City Star and its companion paper, the morning Times, and Roy Roberts is the boss. Neither he nor the building looks the part--nor, for that matter, does the Star look much like the usual daily newspaper. Roberts is rumpled and jowly, the very image of a ward politician--a role he loves to play. The building, a three-story pile of dun brick veneered with half a century's grime, looks more like a police station than a newspaper office. The Star's front page, a somber, forbidding block of type only faintly relieved by narrow headlines and a picture or two, has all the eye appeal of Webster's dictionary.

Easing his magnificent paunch along the rows of vintage yellow-oak desks in the second-floor news room, Roberts deposits his 218 Ibs. in the corner he has occupied off and on since 1928. But soon he is up again and leaning over the news desk. "Anything big?" he asks, a question he repeats before every edition. By early afternoon, the basement presses roll out a newspaper that in Cowgill, Humansville, Farmersville, Fair Play, Peculiar, Knob Noster, Kansas City, and several hundred other Missouri-Kansas communities is familiar, reassuring--and powerful.

Grey Heads. In appearance and content, today's Star closely resembles the paper founded 79 years ago by William Rockhill Nelson, a migrant Indiana contractor. The Star was and is interested in Kansas City, in Missouri, the Prairie States, the Midwest, the U.S., and the world, in just that order. It has two staffers in Washington, one in New York and one in Paris, but it has three in Independence, Mo. and five in Johnson County, Kans. Says Roy Roberts: "We take care of home base first."

In some ways, the Star is a paper of paradoxes. Many city-room staffers have to walk to a central table to make a phone call, but simply by flipping a switch on his desk, the assignment editor can put himself in instant radio touch with staffers manning the fleet of editorial cars or flying off to a story by chartered plane. The phalanx of city-room desks is liberally speckled with grey heads, most of them belonging to veterans of the staff-owned paper who cannot bear to part with their Star stock holdings, which must be cashed in when they leave the paper: the Star's police reporter William Moorhead, 61, has shares worth better than $150,000. In contrast to most newspapers, the Star's seven-man corps of editorial writers is a surprisingly young and active crew: four are in their 305.

Basically a Republican newspaper, the Star does not accept a liberal or conservative label, always reserves the right to cross party lines. Roy Roberts was one of the first Eisenhower-for-President crusaders in 1952 and still stands firmly behind Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson. But the Star has taken strong exception to some Eisenhower Administration policies (it called for the resignation of John Foster Dulles long before he became ill), and last year it enthusiastically supported the re-election of Kansas City's Democratic Congressman Richard Boiling.

Firming up the Star's editorial positions, the editorial writing staff emerges periodically from the ivory tower to gather firsthand information, plant ideas, and lobby for the Star's causes. Last month, alarmed about a rising traffic death rate, the Star ran a lead editorial deploring the carnage, then sent Editorial Writer James W. Scott out for earnest conferences with Police Chief Bernard Brannon and other authorities. Result: a new 36-man traffic detail and a series of frontpage editorials backing up the police department's campaign.

Monopoly & Men. Through their public-service crusades, the Kansas City papers hope to erase the taint of monopoly. For years, the Star and the morning Times (and the combined Sunday Star) imperiously forced subscribers to take both papers and made advertisers buy space in both or stay out. In 1955, the U.S. Government broke up this trust by decree, prompting dozens of civil damage suits brought by vicinity papers and advertisers claiming injury. The cost in embarrassment was great, and that was not all. The financial strain caused the Star to postpone an ambition of many years' standing to print its own Sunday supplement, and kept it from a new effort to improve its lagging color program.

The Star and the Times have other problems. In recent years, as mounting costs forced the subscription rate up, both papers suffered the circulation loss inevitable in a rural area where thrift-conscious farmers are inclined to drop the big-city paper rather than pay more. Together, the Star and the Times have 671,188 subscribers today, down some 40,000 since 1949. Staffers wonder, too, who will take over when Roy Roberts decides to retire. His key editors have worked long years in his shadow; behind him stands no one groomed to take his place.

No one in Kansas City thinks that these problems will go unsolved. The dirty old building at 18th Street and Grand Avenue has an almost palpable air of permanence, and Roy Roberts' papers will go on pushing for the main cause to which they were dedicated at birth: what's good for Kansas City.

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