The Press: Grass Roots Courier

Of all the U.S. towns that bear Abe Lincoln’s name, the one in Illinois (pop. 12,750) got there first. Townsfolk proudly hark back to a homely ceremony in 1853 when Abe Lincoln, a local attorney, broke open a peddler’s watermelon, scattered the seeds along the Chicago & Mississippi tracks. “Now,” said Abe, “this town is duly christened.”

Lincoln last week won a new distinction, and Allyne and John Nugent, who run the daily Courier, got congratulations from the governor, scores of their 6,300 readers. The New York Museum of Science & Industry, which passes out annual awards to businesses, for the first time had picked a newspaper—and christened the Courier “America’s foremost small-town daily.” Reason: its talent for “promoting American life, reaching to the grass roots. . . .”

Actually, the Courier is far from being what the Emporia (Kan.) Gazette was in William Allen White’s prime. But it is a representative, small U.S. daily; a successful, homely, friendly pillar of the community.

Beer and Belligerence. The Lincoln Courier is housed in a brick building on Courthouse Square, with a game room upstairs where thirsty printers can slake their thirst with beer. The Courier is belligerently Republican, more isolationist than the Chicago Tribune, if possible.

Two years ago the Courier defeated a Lincoln mayor when he disagreed with it on parking meters. Now it is thumping away at an airport for feeder lines, a war memorial. It still puts out a lively, fortnightly tabloid, with pinups, for local boys overseas. Executive Editor Ken Goodrich prods news out of 19 rural correspondents, runs locally-written guest editorials. His five full-time staffers write on copy paper of different colors, so that he can tell at a glance who wrote what.

“Like a Housewife.” Small, hard-eyed Allyne Velome Scheerer Carpenter Nugent, the boss, is a lithe and fiftyish fireball who has the respect, if not the love, of her staff. She inherited the Courier in 1925, five years later had worked herself into a breakdown. She went to Paris to get over it, met and married a young English-Canadian named John Lithgow Nugent-Fyfe. In Lincoln her new husband dropped the Lithgow and Fyfe, suspecting that midwesterners would not cotton to hyphenations. He ran the business end.

The Courier’s first lady says she keeps her highly profitable daily out of debt by running it “the way a housewife operates a home.” Even labor unions are apt to heed when she says “Now listen, boys. I’ll take care of you as long as you do what I think is right. . . .”