Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [17]
Grozier was in danger of folding almost from the first edition. To purchase the paper, he had exhausted his life savings and plunged deep into debt. When he took the keys to the Post’s tired offices he was left with only one hundred dollars in cash. In the meantime, the thirty-two-year-old newspaper owner had a growing family to feed. In 1885, while working for Pulitzer, he had married Alice Goodell, the daughter of a prominent Salem, Massachusetts couple. When they returned from New York to Boston they had a four-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter.
In the days of larger-than-life newspapermen, Edwin Grozier seemed physically unfit for the job. One day, a young leather worker walked upstairs to the publisher’s second-floor office overlooking Washington Street. The leather worker stepped inside, hoping to be hired as a reporter despite his complete lack of qualifications for the job. He immediately thought he had entered the wrong office. He found the editor and publisher of the Post to be “a small, brownish man who sat at a large desk . . . just another undersized party, rather delicate and plaintive-looking, perhaps because he wore a straggly moustache, had a rug over his knees, and peered benevolently at me over the tops of his glasses.” The job applicant also might have noted that Grozier had close-set eyes, curtained by heavy lids.
Yet Grozier would not have minded the unflattering description; he was modest by nature and had no interest in provoking awe, particularly among the reporters he sent scouring the city for scoops. Something about the young man appealed to Grozier, and he offered him a job at eighteen dollars a week. It was the start of a remarkable writing career for Kenneth Roberts, who became a star at the Post and the best-selling author of the historical novels Arundel and Northwest Passage.
Edwin Grozier compensated for his lack of physical presence with what Roberts called “newspaper genius.” From the moment he took control of the paper, Grozier operated under a few guiding principles he once articulated: “Of first importance is the securing of the confidence, respect, and affection of your readers—by deserving them. Study the census. Know your field. Build scientifically. Print a little better newspaper than you think the public wants. Do not try to rise by pulling your contemporaries down. Attend to your own business. Do not believe your kind friends if they assure you that you are a genius. But work, work, work.”
He issued a public call to arms in his debut editorial: “By performance rather than promise the new Post seeks to be judged. By deed rather than words its record will be made.” He declared that the Post “aspires to guard the public interests, to be a bulwark against political corruption, an ally of justice and a scourge to crime; to defend the oppressed, to help the poor, to further the still grander development of the glorious civilization of New England.”
Grand sentiments were one thing, but Grozier knew he had to meet a payroll and the demands of creditors. His first actions on those fronts were counterintuitive: He dropped the paper’s price from three cents to a penny—a technique he had learned from Pulitzer to boost circulation—and lowered the cost of advertising. He also called a meeting of his creditors and asked their forbearance; he would pay them in full, he promised, but he needed time and more credit to keep afloat. Impressed by his sincerity, and hoping to avoid the pennies-on-the-dollar payoff that would result from Grozier’s failure, the creditors agreed. Still, the early years remained lean, and paydays were sometimes anxious. Grozier never missed a payroll, but more than once his staff gathered at the cashier’s window waiting to be paid from last-minute advertising receipts and the pennies turned in by newsboys. Sometimes even that was not enough, and Grozier borrowed to pay his staff.
“Most of the time, figuratively speaking, there was an ‘angel’ in one room