Press Lord Retires

In his corner office high above Manhattan's Park Avenue, Scripps-Howard's Roy Wilson Howard riffled through a stack of well-wishing telegrams: at 77 he had just announced that he was retiring after 33 years as editor of the New York World-Telegram and Sun, divesting himself of all executive responsibility and authority. Said Roy Howard, who for several years had been removing himself from management of the Scripps-Howard chain, as he looked back on more than 60 years in journalism: "Newspapers, I like to think, are the common denominator of popular thinking. In the old days newspapers thundered at their readers. Now they are down among them."

The words had a lordly ring--and Roy Howard had long since been certified as a U.S. press lord. Under Howard, the 19-paper Scripps-Howard newspaper chain has become the nation's biggest. With an eye that saw red when red figures appeared in the ledgers and could find only blue skies in black balances, Howard had kept Scripps-Howard financially strong. It was managerial shrewdness that also made him continue a policy of giving free rein to experienced and able editors, like the Cleveland Press's Louis Seltzer, who have made distantly owned papers conscientious and sometimes contentious members of their communities.

Yet, for all his financial and managerial talents, Roy Howard prefers to think of himself as a journalist, and in his day he was a fairly flamboyant one. In a press era increasingly dominated by blue serge businessman, he has been one of journalism's most vivid personalities. His clothes looked as though they had been cut from a bolt of the rainbow. Brash and profane, he had enough gall to be thrice divided.

Maybe a Good One. The son of a railroad brakeman, Roy Howard was born in a tollgate house in Gano, Ohio, and was blooded in the newspaper business hawking papers as a boy in Indianapolis. He drifted from paper to paper before finally latching onto a job with the Cincinnati Post of the Scripps-McRae chain. Three years later he met the chain's guiding genius: E. W. Scripps. It was quite a meeting.

"All of Old Man Scripps's sons were over six feet tall," Howard has recalled, "and he naturally had a preference for tall men. When I stood in front of him, 5 ft. 6 in. tall and weighing about 115 Ibs., he pushed his glasses up on his forehead and said: 'My God, another little one.' " Replied Howard: "Yes, but maybe a good one this time."

Working his way upward in a hurry,

Howard in 1907 took over as general news manager of United Press, which had been formed by Scripps from three other news-gathering services. In less than five years, Howard was U.P.'s president. In 1922 Howard complained to Old Man Scripps that the Scripps newspapers had become chronic growlers instead of champions of the public interest. Scripps made Howard a partner in the chain, let him renovate the policy of the papers. In no time at all they became more determinedly "different"--but in the process lost much of the idealistic Scripps zeal.

Howard's editorial trademarks include heavily headlined, often exaggerated "exposes" of two-bit foreign-aid boondoggling (a pet Howard peeve that his pet columnists work at) and a kind of editorial writing style that tries to be "hard-hitting" when it is working hardest to straddle an issue (as one of his colleagues once remarked, "Roy is all but, and a yard wide").

Oddly Accurate. As a working press lord, Roy Howard loved nothing better than to see his own byline. The most conspicuous one he ever got was when he filed his famed false Armistice report, on a say-so of an admiral, four days before World War I actually ended. He prided himself on brashness. For example, as Howard recalled last week, in 1936 "I was in Paris, sitting in a cafe, kind of wondering whether I was all washed up, whether I was any good. I took a cable blank that was lying around and wrote on it: 'Joseph Stalin, Kremlin, Moscow. Arriving Friday evening for visit until following Tuesday. Much appreciate interview.' " The result: a rare, on-the-record talk in which Stalin warned Japan against going too far too fast in Manchuria. Howard now says of his reportorial career: "I acquired a reputation as a reporter that I never deserved --this despite the fact that I had some considerable success."

On the Sidelines? With the announce ment last week of his retirement, most old Scripps-Howard hands could talk fondly of Roy Howard's many virtues and even, with a certain warped sense of pride, of his faults. One of the stories reechoing through the Scripps-Howard city rooms was of the time when Howard was among the guests of honor at a Washington dinner for successful ex-Indianans.

The toastmaster introduced Howard as "that great Hoosier, that fearless publisher, the inventor of the minimum wage ..." Howard was three paragraphs through his thank-you speech before he realized he had been insulted. Pausing in midsentence, he growled to the toastmaster: "Why. you sonofabitch." Then, with a beatific smile, he picked up where he had left off in his speech.

Replacing Howard as editor of the World-Telegram and Sun is Lee Wood, 67, a longtime Scripps-Howard man, who has been executive editor of the Telly for the past 29 years. But few of those who know Roy Howard best would wager that he will remain on the sidelines when deci sions affecting Scripps-Howard fortunes are made. For as he himself said last week: "I'm not a candidate for the funeral director yet."

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