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By Root 574 0

fantail was draped in red, white, and blue for the Willkie cruise, and Mrs. Howard, a plump, pleasant woman, who looks a little like the first Mrs. Jimmy Walker, wore seagoing togs of the same colors. Howard stuck to an ensemble of bright green suit, shirt, tie, and hatband. He adopted loud clothes as a trademark when he first went to work nearly forty years ago, believing that they would prevent superiors from forgetting him. The clothes serve no practical purpose now, since he has no superiors, but they have become a habit. Barton, an old friend, explains them by saying, “When a product is going well, you don't change the package.” Soon after Willkie arrived on the Jamaroy, newspapermen who came aboard with him to say goodby discovered that Helen Worden, a reporter on Howard's WorldTelegram, was on the yacht as a guest. Fearing that Miss Worden might write a series of exclusive feature articles, possibly entitled “Wind, Waves, and Willkie,” the other reporters kept complaining to the candidate until he gave in and ungallantly asked Howard to order her ashore, which the publisher did. Howard thought of this as one more instance of the unjust suspicion with which other journalists sometimes regard him. He is extremely sensitive.

One evening, during a particularly acrimonious phase of some negotiations with the American Newspaper Guild, the CIO union of editorial and businessoffice workers which now has contracts with fourteen of the nineteen ScrippsHoward newspapers, Howard learned that a Guild leader had spoken harshly of him at a meeting. Around midnight he called up a subeditor who lived in Yonkers and asked him to come to the Howard home in the East Sixties immediately. At about two o'clock the employee arrived. “Joe,” the publisher shouted before the Howard butler had had time to take the man's hat, “tell me, am I a son of a bitch?” The man said no, and Howard seemed reassured. The same sensitiveness came to light after the passage of the lendlease bill, which Howard and his editors had vigorously opposed. The ScrippsHoward chief telephoned to a number of acquaintances friendly to the administration and asked them if they thought he was an appeaser. “If you ever think I'm getting too far off base,” he told one man, “I wish you'd call up and tell me.”

Despite this concern over other people's opinions of him, the publisher frequently follows courses of action that strangers might consider dictated by selfinterest. There was, for example, the time in 1937 when a Congressional committee was about to investigate loopholes in the incometax law and, it turned out, to name Howard and several other ScrippsHoward officers, along with still other wealthy men, as having set up personal holding companies to cut down their taxes. Howard's particular device, entirely within the law, had saved him eighty thousand dollars in taxes on his taxable income of five hundred thousand dollars in 1936. For weeks before the committee met, Westbrook Pegler, Howard's favorite ScrippsHoward columnist, blasted away at the highhanded and inquisitorial methods of the government's incometax men. Howard must have been tempted to ask Pegler, as a favor, to stop, on the ground that the world might think the excitement more than a coincidence, or to omit some of the Pegler columns from his newspapers. However, the publisher steeled himself against such tampering with the liberty of the press, and the columnist's opinions appeared.

Something in Howard's stature and carriage suggests a jockey, but he would be too big to ride in anything except a steeplechase. Howard blames the late Arthur Brisbane for spreading the impression that he is ridiculously short. “Brisbane once tried to get me into the Hearst organization,” he says, “and he never forgave me for turning him down. After I got well known, he always referred to me in his column as 'little Roy Howard.' Arthur could never understand a man who wasn't interested in money.” Sometimes, to prove that he is not really small, Howard invites new acquaintances to stand up beside him in front of an immense mirror