The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [88]
Scripps never tried to build a large metropolitan newspaper. He remained true all his life to a formula of establishing liberal, shoestring newspapers in towns so much alike in their outlook that the publications could have practically interchangeable parts. The national policies of the papers were determined at annual conventions of Scripps editors held at French Lick, Indiana, where Scripps would berate them all on general principles. The editors could determine their own local policies, provided they favored labor. In the eighties, Scripps, as a young man, had tried to run a newspaper in St. Louis and had found Joseph Pulitzer's PostDispatch too well intrenched in the liberal field in that city He had thereupon decided that he was destined to be a newspaper Woolworth rather than a Tiffany. Except for St. Louis and Chicago, where he launched a smallscale experiment with an intentionally adless newspaper just before the World War, Scripps tried no city larger than Cleveland. There, in 1878, he founded the enormously profitable Press with an initial investment of $12,500. Howard, while he worked under Scripps, was a liberal too. He was frantically adaptable.
The town of Gano, in southwestern Ohio, where Howard was born in 1883, is so small that it does not appear in an ordinary library atlas. Howard usually refers to himself as a Hoosier because his family moved to Indianapolis seven years after he was born. William Howard, his father, was for several years a railroad brakeman and later became a conductor. Railroad pay was low in the last century, and the Howards had a harder time than most railroad families, even though Roy was an only child. William Howard was tubercular, and a good part of his income went for medical care. When a friend a few years ago made fun of Howard for tipping a Paris taxi driver only fifty centimes, the publisher declared solemnly, “If my father had had a thousand dollars saved up, he could have gone out to Colorado and been cured.” Howard sometimes speaks appreciatively of the railroad labor brotherhoods, because, he says, his father's pay and working conditions were terrible in those old nonunion days. Roy went to Manual Training High School in Indianapolis, and became the school correspondent for the Indianapolis News. William Howard died during his son's senior year, and after the boy graduated he went to work as a reporter on the city staff of the News at eight dollars a week. He soon transferred to the Star, the opposition paper, where he became sports editor at twenty a week. Supporting his widowed mother, the boy, small, tense, determined to get on, adopted his now wellknown uniform of gaudy shirts and patentleather shoes as an outward disclaimer of his inward forebodings.
On the Indianapolis News, Howard met several men who became more or less fixtures in his life. Among them was the late Ray Long, a slightly older Hoosier, who was already city editor of that paper. Long, about Howard's size, was shallow, quick, energetic, and hedonistic. Howard always admired him as a pattern of worldliness and savoirvivre. For twentyfive years, from 1910, when Long left Indianapolis to be a magazine editor, until 1935, when he committed suicide, he and Howard were inseparable companions after working hours. During that period Long edited Red Book, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines. Another friend Howard made in Indianapolis was a reporter named Lowell Mellett, a Hoosier born in the Elwood that Wendell L. Willkie subsequently made famous. Mellett, present director of the Office of Government Reports