Canceled Check

One asset that Chicago Sun-Times Publisher Marshall Field Jr. insisted on keeping when he bought the Chicago Daily News two years ago was the News's cask-shaped executive editor, Basil Leon Walters. Then 62, "Stuffy" already had 40 newspapering years under his size 44 belt, and that seemed like enough. But at Field's request he agreed to stay--at least until the News completed the move to Field's new Sun-Times building on the Chicago River. This week, the shift successfully completed, Stuffy Walters lit up a fat cigar, said goodbye all around, and headed for his pig farm in Frankfort, Ind. Said Marshall Field fondly: "He is one of the really great editors of our time."

There are those who consider Field's assessment a bit generous. One longtime News staffer (Stuffy wishes he knew who) insisted that his boss was "as profound as a one-pound box of chocolates"; a former city editor has compared working for Walters to "being bitten to death by a duck." Robert M. Hutchins, who went on to become chancellor of the University of Chicago after helping Walters put out a paper for U.S. troops in Italy during World War I, has been even more outspoken. Some years ago Hutchins complained: "What can you expect us to do in education when the press is in the hands of men like Stuffy Walters?" Such bitter comment rolls like water off the biting duck's back. "I don't pay a damn bit of attention to the critics," says Walters. "Right or wrong, I have to stand on my convictions."

"Tell, Don't Write." Stuffy's convictions have discomfited, enraged and educated newsmen and newspapers all over the Midwest. Sent to Minneapolis in 1937 to improve the lot of the Star, then running third in a field of three dailies, Stuffy ordered lost-dog stories put on Page One. He had the disconcerting habit of stopping reporters on their way to the typewriter and asking to hear their story. As the newsman talked, a stenographer surreptitiously took down every word. Later, when the reporter turned in his story, Stuffy triumphantly flourished the steno's transcript. "That's the way it should have been written," he said. "Tell your story; don't write it." In two years, accelerated by such tactics, the Star was out in front of its competitors.

On the Chicago Daily News, which Stuffy joined in 1944, the legend soon grew that Stuffy would throw out any sentence of more than 14 words. It was true that the News's new editor liked choppy prose, especially in the lead paragraph. Too long, said Stuffy to a reporter who had proudly tendered an eight-word first paragraph for a story about economic conditions: "Will there be a boom or a bust?" After repeated tries, the reporter boiled it down to one word: "Boom?" This was followed by a second one-word paragraph: "Bust?" The third paragraph was a shade longer: "This is the question." Stuffy loved it.

"They Can't Read." The News was immensely vain about its foreign news service, and stories that came in by cable were considered inviolate. Not by Stuffy. There were transoceanic cries of dismay when he began slicing foreign correspondents' stuff with a ruthless pencil, even rejecting it when he thought the wire services had done a better job. "Start where the services left off." he urged. "Do the whys and wherefores." A few Newsmen quit in the face of this sensible objective; Walters was hardly perturbed.

"When I came in," he said, "we had 38 clients for our foreign news service. Today we have 60. To the critics who say this approach has been all wrong, I say that I don't think they can read."

Walters' critics can scarcely deny that what Stuffy does seems to work. Since he went to work in 1919 as telegraph editor of the Indianapolis Star* he has repeatedly proved his point, but nowhere more emphatically than on the News. After 16 years with Cowles papers in Des Moines and Minneapolis, Walters joined Knight Newspapers Inc., was sent to the News when Publisher John S. Knight added it to his chain. The paper was $12,500,000 in debt and sorely needed therapy. Knight was sure that Stuffy was the man.

Life Begins at 65. He was. Besides cutting sentence length, Walters sought the common touch (he preferred "mom" to mother, even in print) and plumped for the local angle on every story. He kept his staff busy snooping for "those 'honest' crooks in public office," and the News found them. In 1956, for example, the paper had the satisfaction of seeing Illinois Auditor Orville Hodge sent to prison after a News reporter, George Thiem, exposed his habit of dipping into the state treasury.

Before Jack Knight, heartsore at the death of his son Frank, sold the News to Field in 1959, the paper had leapfrogged past its afternoon competitor, Chicago's American, in circulation (547,796 to 467,557), was free of debt and showing a profit of $1,250,000 a year. By then, Stuffy was executive editor of all Knight papers.

Although his job is finished in Chicago, Stuffy is not going to Frankfort just to feed the hogs. At his farmhouse, carpenters are building an addition that will accommodate Stuffy's new retirement project: Newspaper Research Associates, a consulting service for newspapers. One of the better newspaper doctors in the profession, he has already signed three clients--among them the Chicago Daily News. "Yesterday with me is a canceled check," says Stuffy Walters. "Tomorrow is a promissory note. I expect to have more fun after 65 than I did before."

*Where he stayed long enough to get his nickname. Some accounts say it sprang from his resemblance to John Phaelen ("Stuffy") McInnis, infielder for the Boston Red Sox of the early 1920's, others that it paid homage to Walters' talent as a trencherman.

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