The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [90]
The first president of the United Press was John Vandercook, a former Cincinnati Post official who knew Howard. Howard made his interest in the U.P. known, and Vandercook hired him as New York district manager. Mellett soon came on from Cincinnati, too, and for a while the two Indianapolis boys, both thin, shared a single bed in the apartment he and his mother rented. Hawkins came on from Louisville, where he was working on the CourierJournal. The United Press was guaranteed against loss in the first few years by dues Scripps levied on the score of papers he controlled to cover the news agency's operating costs. Scripps, following his custom, reserved fiftyone per cent of the stock for himself, giving an option on twenty per cent to Vandercook and an option on another twenty per cent to Hamilton B. Clark, the business manager. Minor executives had chances to acquire smaller blocks of stock. The executives were to pay for their stock out of the profits of the new venture, if profits developed. This was a system Scripps had developed for giving executives of his newspapers an extra incentive. Even today ScrippsHoward executives of importance usually have an agreement with the management that they call “a deal,” which means that they are rewarded with stock in the corporation employing them, if the corporation shows a profit. When an executive leaves one ScrippsHoward corporation for another, or for the outside world, he is compelled to surrender his stock at a price fixed by an “appraisal board” of other ScrippsHoward brass hats. His successor then has a chance to acquire the same stock. Vandercook, a newspaperman of great ability, died suddenly just as the United Press profits began to come in. Howard, already conspicuous for his push, begged for a chance at Vandercook's job. Gilson Gardner, Scripps's secretary, has described Howard as “busy as a wasp trying to get through a windowpane.” Clark backed the youngster. Scripps was at Miramar, his California ranch. He spent most of his time there because he didn't like other rich men and couldn't abide poor people, he once told one of his associates. The old man had never seen Howard, but Scripps's wife and Howard's mother had been chums as girls, and Scripps had heard a good deal about him. “I was surprised at being urged to let Howard be tried out,” Scripps later wrote. But he gave him the job. “My fancy was tickled with the idea,” the old man continued; “my propensity to try experiments demonstrated itself again. However, Howard made good. Howard continued to make good. The United Press…began to grow into a property that had an actual value.” Soon Howard got a chance to buy Vandercook's twentypercent share of the company's stock, and did so. Clark resigned to found a Philadelphia paper, and Howard also picked up his twenty per cent. In 1909, Howard made a trip abroad to report to Scripps on the foreignnewsgathering arrangements. Some time before, he had met a young freelance newspaperwoman named Margaret Rohe in New York. Miss Rohe, tiring of letters, had gone to London in the cast of an American show called The Chorus Lady, in which she had a small speaking part. Howard met her again in London and married her. Howard's mother took a second husband a few years after her son's marriage and moved to the Pacific coast, where she died in 1931.
The United Press started off with the same independent Left Wing slant for which the ScrippsMcRae newspapers were known. That was because, in the beginning, most of its clients were members of the chain. In its handling of the strikes of the Danbury hatters in 1912 and the Paterson silk workers in 1912 and 1913, the U.P. was noticeably more prolabor than the Associated Press. The contrast gradually disappeared. Howard was not slow to recognize that a news service has a market unlike that of