Volunteer Mencken

"Newspapers," said the New York Herald Tribune's John Campbell Crosby last week, "need another H. L. Mencken."

With that, John Crosby, an urbanely acerbic 48, unabashedly volunteered for the job. He ended a 14-year career in which he had become the nation's best-known syndicated radio and television columnist--and announced that henceforth he would be a critic of all U.S. society. His parting shot at TV: "This great medium of information and education is totally dedicated to utter vacuity."

Fledgling Pundit Crosby, an alumnus of Exeter and Yale, says: "I am a reformer, a moralist by nature. The new column will have a strong moral slant. It would be presumptuous to say I will play the role of judge. I will be more a critic of society."

The early returns on Crosby's pronouncement were something less than a vote of confidence. About half the 82 newspapers that carry his TV comments are expected to drop his new column. The reaction did not dismay Crosby, who expects that when the public has learned to appreciate his moral marksmanship, "twice as many papers will carry my column as we have now."

John Crosby's decision to try on Mencken's mantle is the result of an anguished, three-year tussle with himself and the H. T. syndicate. The syndicate feared a loss of readers. Crosby feared a loss of sanity if he kept on working television. "I can't look at that box any more or I'll go crazy," he confessed. And in his farewell column he wrote: "It gets harder and harder to write a coherent sentence . . ."

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