The Press: Ring Out, Mild Bells

“Be handsome if you can, witty if you must, but be agreeable even if it kills you.” So goes the maxim that often uplifts the front page of the most determinedly bigtime, small-town weekly newspaper in the U.S.: Grit, published in Williamsport, Pa. (pop. 46,000), by a bald, conservative optimist named George Lamade. By being aggressively agreeable, plain-looking, plain-spoken Grit has built up a national circulation of nearly 900,000 in 48 states, this month will celebrate its 75th birthday as the paper “that rings the joy bells of life.”

Pealing for all it’s worth, tabloid Grit over the years has given a big play to pictures and success stories of persons grittily overcoming handicaps (sample subject: deaf children learning to talk), decorously avoided touchy topics from the Kinsey report to the Confidential trial. Such a dry-cleaned view of the news stems from Publisher Lamade’s German-born father, Dietrick, who with two others bought the tiny, two-year-old paper in 1884 for $1,000, and until his death in 1938 exhorted his staff to “avoid showing the wrong side of things or making people feel discontented.”

To show the right side of things, Grit has a staff of 22 headed by Editor Kenneth Dean Rhone, 50, a staffer for 26 years, who got his start, while a student at the University of Michigan, as “director of tourist publicity” for hometown Williamsport’s Chamber of Commerce. Editor Rhone gets steady contributions from a corps of 100 part-time correspondents around the nation, carries weekly some $20,000 worth of ads. Grit comes out in three editions each week: city and area (40,000), state (112,000) and national (728,000). Subscriptions are almost all hustled up by 30,000 boys in 16,000 communities, nearly 60% of which have a population of 2,500 or less. Some former GnYboys: Poet Carl Sandburg, General Alfred M. Gruenther, South Dakota’s Senator Francis Case.

“Our readers are home-loving folks,” says Lamade. “Their interests are their families, their churches, their schools. But they are attuned to what’s going on in the world . . . The Sputniks don’t mean that we’ll live in a decadent America,” says Publisher Lamade. “We’ve got to be realistic, but it’s the direction in which we’re headed that counts. Right and moral values will prevail in the end. Grit will remain optimistic, informative, entertaining, inspirational and forward-looking. Grit will be eternally vigilant.”