In His Own Backyard

The Dover, Del., State News possesses many distinctions. It may well be the only U.S. daily whose reporters cannot come in out of the rain. The roof leaks. Its editor accepts payola--and brags about it. Accept the gift and ignore the giver, he says. He also quarrels with his wife on the editorial page and takes pride in not knowing what his writers are going to say next. Simply by being there, the paper has canceled one of the city's own claims to distinction: until the State News came along, Dover was the only state capital in the U.S. without a daily newspaper.

Furled Pickets. The architect of this improbable journalistic edifice is a onetime jeweler who invaded Dover for the simple reason that it was there and waiting. Until 1953, Bernard John Smyth's horizon did not extend beyond Renovo, Pa. There, after selling his share of the family jewelry store, he bought the Renovo Daily Record. Then some friend told him about Dover. Smyth froze like a pointer. If Renovo could support a daily with 3,000 inhabitants, why couldn't Dover, with 7,000 residents and a thriving girdle factory?

Smyth moved to Delaware, bought up Dover's weekly newspaper and converted it to a daily. He watched sorrowfully as circulation fell overnight from 4,200 to 2,000; Doverites seemed quite content with the two Du Pont-owned papers published in nearby Wilmington, the Journal and the News. There were also other growing pains. The International Typographical Union tried to organize Smyth's pitifully small stable of printers. But Smyth put his back up, imported substitutes from as far off as Texas, and after two years the I.T.U. furled its last picket sign and slunk away, its strike broken.

Labyrinthine Ways. In occasional issues, the paper's front page displays nothing but local news, some of it under such gamy headlines as "BALDY" PICKS A LEMON IN THE GARDEN OF LOVE (a divorce suit). An inordinate amount of space is devoted to letters to the editor --every one that comes in to the paper is printed in full.

But there is more to it than that. The State News covered the state legislature with such thoroughness that the Wilmington papers' one-man Dover bureau hollered for reinforcements--and got them. Smyth's men scored a clean beat over the Wilmington dailies with a story about a state welfare department scandal--in Wilmington. During the severe Atlantic Coast storm that wrecked Delaware for two March days in 1962, State News coverage was far superior to that of the Wilmington papers.

After ten years, Dover has grown accustomed to Jack Smyth's labyrinthine ways, including his three arrests for drunkenness--all of them reported in the State News. Today the State News is a Dover institution, like the girdle factory. It has a circulation of 13,112, and has shaved some 5,000 off the circulation of the competitive Wilmington Journal in what Jack Smyth now regards as part of his own backyard.

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