The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [95]
“No one possessed of a drop of the milk of human kindness could view with disinterest the situation of the many employees of the World who face at least temporary unemployment,” Howard said in a prepared statement after the transaction was closed. He had Lee Wood, managing editor of the Telegram, set up a registration office in the ramshackle Telegram Building on Dey Street for survivors of the World publications.
In the first issue of the new WorldTelegram, Heywood Broun, the Telegram's columnist graduate of the World, wrote, “It is my sincere belief that the ScrippsHoward chain is qualified by its record and its potentialities to carry on the Pulitzer tradition of liberal journalism.” His optimism was based on his own relations with the Telegram before the merger. For several years, Broun, like a star pitcher with a lastplace baseball club, had been allowed a flattering latitude of opinion in his column. The Telegram circulation had risen only infinitesimally in four years of hard pulling with Howard as coxswain, but it was probably true, as the publisher said, that a new set of readers had replaced the old ones who had bought the Telegram for the racing news and Tammany items. The new Telegram readers were people willing to pay three cents to see what Broun had to say.
The WorldTelegram, which made its first appearance on the day after the merger, resembled a colored houseman wearing some of his dead massa's old clothes. Rollin Kirby, Denys Wortman, and Will B. Johnstone, the cartoonists, were retained from the World, along with Harry Hansen's book column and J. Otis Swift's nature notes. On the whole, it was an amorphous publication that looked like the result of physically telescoping two totally different newspapers. It bulked large because Howard had taken over the Evening World advertising contracts. Since the advertising rates had been based on a circulation of less than three hundred thousand and that of the merged paper hovered for a while around a half million, the WorldTelegram lost money on every advertisement printed. When Howard later raised the rates in proportion to the new circulation, many advertisers quit. They have had to be wooed back over a stretch of years, a factor which some critics contend has had a perceptible influence on the newspaper's policy. Within a few months after the merger, the WorldTelegram had returned to the appearance and editorial formula of the ScrippsHoward Telegram, except for the three new cartoonists, and Swift, and Hansen. A number of World reporters and sports writers hired at the time of the merger were not with the new paper long. That summer, the WorldTelegram moved into a new building at 125 Barclay Street. At about the same time, Howard, finally the important and fullfledged New Yorker he had long looked forward to becoming, with a major local paper of his own, gave up his suburban home, which was on Pelhamdale Avenue in Pelham, and moved into the heart of town. The Pelham house had seventeen rooms and five baths; the one he took on the East Side, near Central Park, has sixteen rooms, six baths, and an elevator. The elevator is not quite high enough for a tall man to stand upright in. The diminutive publisher enjoys seeing his tall executives, such as Lee Wood, stoop when they ride in it.
When Howard had bought the World, he had told the press that the transaction meant not “the death of the World but its rebirth.” However, the WorldTelegram made no serious effort to carry on the World tradition. The foreign staff of the World, which even in the paper's last years included such correspondents as John Balderston and William Bolitho, went out of existence. The WorldTelegram rarely sent members of its own staff farther out of New York than, say, Hopewell, New Jersey, mostly relying on the ScrippsHoward United Press and outoftown ScrippsHoward newspapers to cover it on more distant assignments. The Scottsboro, Alabama, trials, for example, were described for the