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By Root 564 0

W. Scripps Company's net worth was $43,161,753, making Howard's and Hawkins' stakes in it roughly $5,611,027 and $2,805,513, respectively. Its net earnings in that year were $1,530,000. The other 80.2 per cent of the stock is owned by the Edward W. Scripps Trust, which was established by the Scripps will. Robert Paine Scripps, last surviving son of the founder of the company, was sole trustee during his lifetime. The stock now is held by the trust for his three sons. The present trustees are Howard, Hawkins, and George B. Parker, the editorinchief of all the newspapers. The three are to be relieved of their duties in turn as Robert Paine, Jr., Charles Edward, and Samuel H., the three sons of Robert Paine Scripps, reach the age of twentyfive. Hawkins will retire as trustee in 1943, when the eldest boy reaches that age. Parker will yield his place to the second son in 1945. Howard is slated to remain until 1952 before giving way to the youngest Scripps son. Since Howard and Hawkins always vote alike, the arrangement leaves the two partners, as complementary and alliterative as a gentile Potash and Perlmutter, effectively in control of a property which includes nineteen newspapers, several newspaper syndicates, and the great United Press. Parker is a sternlooking, whitehaired man, conspicuously decorated with a Phi Beta Kappa key He was graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1908 and is the cultural force of the triumvirate.

Until shortly after Robert Paine Scripps' death, Howard and Hawkins had no share in the parent E. W. Scripps Company, but possessed large interests in several of the individual properties it controlled, particularly the WorldTelegram. Since, as trustees of the Edward W. Scripps Trust, they might have been suspected of favoring certain subsidiaries at the expense of others, they exchanged their holdings for shares in the E. W. Scripps Company.

If Howard and Hawkins constituted a vaudeville team, Howard would be known as the star and Hawkins as the feeder. Flashy, mercurial, and enormously energetic, Howard, in conferences with Hawkins, characteristically walks around his seated partner like an ocean traveler circumambulating a deck. Hawkins intones only brief, bass responses to Howard's rapid tenor litany and speeds or slows Howard's gyrations by increasing or diminishing the degree of what seems to be apathy in his voice. Howard expresses great faith in his intuition, but he usually seeks reassurance from others before he acts on it. He doesn't expect to be contradicted, but he does gauge the intensity of an associate's approval. A couple of unadorned yeses from an editorial writer, for example, would indicate the man's deep conviction that Howard was wrong. Hawkins is actually four months younger than Howard, who was born on January 1, 1883, but he sometimes refers to his partner as “the boy.” “We would have had the boy dressed up if we'd known you were coming,” he once said to a visitor when Howard stepped into his office wearing a relatively subdued arrangement of suit, shirt, and tie all in a large blackandwhite hound'stooth pattern. Hawkins has an idea that Howard's yacht is bad publicity for the firm and does his best in conversation to make it sound like a dory. “It's really not much of a yacht,” he says. “I don't know what the hell he wants it for.” The Jamaroy is a 110foot power vessel which once belonged to C. F. Kettering, a vicepresident of General Motors.

Howard and Hawkins made their way up in the newspaper world with the United Press, which the elder Scripps established in 1907 after buying out a news service known as the Publishers' Press Association. They both went to work there that year. Howard's flashier qualities got him off to a faster start than Hawkins, and they assumed their present roles in the combination almost instinctively. When Howard became president and general manager of the United Press in 1912, Hawkins became second in command. When Howard resigned in 1920 to become chairman of the board of the Scripps newspapers, Hawkins succeeded him as president of the United