The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [80]
Howard has a wedgeshaped face, broad at the temples and tapering toward the chin, and has a short, closecropped, graying mustache. His face is youthful in a curious way, reminding one of a prematurely old boy. He is actually fiftyeight. One of Howard's characteristics is a high, banjostring voice that plucks at a hearer's attention, dominates it, and then lulls it until, like the buzz of a mosquito returning from a swing around a room, the sound increases in intensity and awakes the listener again. He is acutely conscious of prolixity in others. He once telephoned a ScrippsHoward editor in Washington from New York to tell him of a longdistance conversation he had just had with Joseph P. Kennedy, who was in Boston. “That Kennedy talks your ear off,” Howard complained. “I was paying the charges, and he had me on the phone for fortyfive minutes.” When Howard hung up, the editor looked at his watch. The publisher had been talking to him for just about fortyfive minutes. Howard occasionally times his telephone calls with a stop watch so that he can later check his bills. Even with the expensive minutes fleeting before his eyes, he has the same emotional difficulty in hanging up a receiver that a fat woman has in waving away a tray of chocolate eclairs.
When Howard is on a local wire his pleasure is uninhibited by economic considerations, and there are days when he practically edits the WorldTelegram, which is at 125 Barclay Street, from his own office at ScrippsHoward headquarters, on the twentysecond floor of 230 Park Avenue. On these days, Lee B. Wood, the executive editor of the WorldTelegram, squirms at his desk in a corner of the newspaper's vast city room, holding the receiver against his ear and repeating “Yes, Roy,” at irregular intervals until his voice sounds as mechanical as the clack of the news tickers. Wood, an extremely tall man, slides forward and down in his seat as such a day progresses, until finally he appears to be resting on his shoulder blades. Howard's voice sometimes seems to have a narcotic effect on the cerebral processes of his subordinates. An irreverent mot of the WorldTelegram city room defines a ScrippsHoward editor as “a man who walks briskly, smiles a lot, and rearranges furniture.” Top editors have an additional function: keeping down expenses. A good ScrippsHoward editor is never too tired to walk around a newspaper plant at the end of the day and turn out unnecessary lights.
This frugality is a heritage from the reign of Edward Wyllis Scripps, the founder of the newspaper chain, who was accustomed to go into towns where there was an established conservative newspaper and start an opposition sheet on a minimum budget. The Scripps entry would plump for labor as a matter of business principle. Its chances of survival depended on keeping expenses low. The Scripps formula, as expressed by a cynical veteran, was to “hire a shed down by the railroad station, put in a press that Gutenberg had scrapped and some linotype machines held together with baling wire, then put in a kid for twelve dollars a week to be editor and promise him one per cent of the profits as soon as the circulation hit a million.” Scripps's thesis, as he himself expounded it, was that a heavy outlay on a newspaper put a publisher at the mercy of bankers and advertisers. Only a shoestring newspaper could afford to be prolabor, he used to say, but if a prolabor paper could survive for a while, it was bound to catch on. He once said that ninetyfive per cent of all newspaper readers were not rich and would read a daily published in the interest of the havenots. A profitable amount of advertising would follow circulation. Scripps remarked late in life that he had founded about forty papers on this shoestring