A Century of Stubbornness

Soon after buying the Sacramento Union last May, Publisher Jim Copley began to concentrate his acquisitive tal ents on a bigger paper considerably farther to the west. Copley not only wanted to buy control of the 110-year-old Honolulu Advertiser, he also in tended to make it the main member of his newspaper chain; he even bought an apartment in Hawaii. By last week, though, Copley was convinced that Advertiser Publisher Thurston Twigg-Smith, 45, and Editor George Chaplin, 52, who between them owned about 60% of the paper's stock, were not about to sell out. To them, the quick, large profit offered by Copley meant far less than the continuing pleasure of putting out a successful paper.

In the end, it was Copley who sold. The stock he had managed to pick up went to the publishing company and Twigg-Smith. Copley wound up with the Advertiser's Honolulu radio station KGU as part of the agreement, which at least leaves him with a good reason to keep his new home.

Palace Revolution. Copley may not have appreciated Twigg-Smith's stubborn heritage. The Advertiser's founder, Henry M. Whitney, scion of a New England missionary family, was the kind of crusader who considered it his duty to campaign against the hula as an economic evil which distracted men from their work. Toward the turn of the century, when Hawaii's famous Castle family held a controlling stock interest, the present publisher's grandfather, Lorrin A. Thurston, was put in charge. He, too, was a campaigner, known for his fiery editorials in favor of U.S. annexation. His son, Lorrin P., who took over the paper in 1931, took up the cause of Hawaiian statehood as his crusade, but as a publisher he seemed to lack his predecessor's skills. The Advertiser, which had long been Hawaii's leading daily, went into a decline, beginning about 1930. After World War II, it started losing $100,000 a year and dropped behind the afternoon Star-Bulletin in circulation.

True to his reputation for intransigence, the younger Thurston refused to relinquish the reins of his faltering newspaper. He scorned the man who seemed destined to succeed him, his Yale-trained nephew, Thurston Twigg-Smith. "He's never been any damn good at anything," he sneered. Twigg-Smith, however, had a different view of his own abilities. In 1961, he engineered a "palace revolution." Though he controlled only 42% of the paper's stock, he quietly signed up other rebels, including the paper's ambitious editor George Chaplin, who had been hired from the New Orleans Item largely because he had written more than 50 editorials urging Hawaiian statehood. With just a fraction of a percentage point over 50% of the stock then at his command, Twigg-Smith confronted his uncle and advised him to step down. A dumbstruck Lorrin P. Thurston took his nephew to court, but the suit was dismissed. In revenge, Thurston sold as much stock as he could to Copley.

Change of Image. Twigg-Smith made big changes from the start. He combined production facilities with the Star-Bulletin, agreed to a merger of the two Sunday papers. He has doubled the editorial budget to $1,000,000 a year, added extra news columns, and increased coverage of Asian politics. The paper's Republican, white-oriented image was also changed. In 1962, the Advertiser supported Democrat Daniel Inouye for the U.S. Senate over Republican Candidate Ben Dillingham, even though Dillingham's father, Walter, was chairman of the Advertiser's board of directors. Walter Dillingham resigned from the board and he, too, sold his stock to Copley. "The Inouye endorsement," says Chaplin, "marked the arrival of the Advertiser in the New Hawaii."

The old daily has now moved into the black, though the circulation gap with the Star-Bulletin remains about the same. Present figures: 111,471 to 67,409. The Advertiser has even become affluent enough to endow a chair in oceanography at the University of Hawaii and to set aside part of its building to house a contemporary art center. "The paper was a decadent thing when we took it over," says Twigg-Smith, now securely in command. "It was top-heavy with old men and had failed to keep up with the times. Now we're putting out the best paper in the history of the islands."

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