The Press: Surprise Package

It was no secret that Houston Endowment, Inc., the $400 million nonprofit foundation set up by the late Secretary of Commerce, Jesse Jones, was anxious to get out of the newspaper business. To the foundation’s trustees, the Houston Chronicle was a persistent annoyance. For one thing, they were involved in constant wrangling with Jesse’s nephew, John T. Jones Jr., the paper’s middle-of-the-road president, who opposed their conservative editorial policies. For another, they were worried that Congress might soon pass legislation forbidding charitable foundations to own active businesses. Last week, to their unconcealed pleasure, the trustees finally found a buyer: Houston Oilman John W. Mecom, 54.

Texas’ third biggest independent oil producer (after H. L. Hunt and J. Paul Getty), Mecom has boosted his personal fortune to $500 million by buying hotels, real estate, fish meal plants, ranches, a construction company and a drugstore. He is, says one detractor, a “frustrated junk dealer”—which is a harsh way of explaining that he likes to collect businesses that other people want to get rid of, and turn them into rewarding moneymakers. Until he bought the Chronicle, however, Mecom had never shown any particular interest in publishing; the paper was not even the main item in his $85 million package purchase from Houston Endowment. He picked up the Chronicle building as well, along with Houston’s 1,000-room Rice Hotel and a controlling interest in Texas National Bank of Commerce, Houston’s second largest bank.

Now that he is in the newspaper business, Mecom is expected to keep his old friend John Jones on as president of the Chronicle. Jones suffered a setback when the trustees fired his hand-picked editor Bill Steven (TIME, Sept. 17) for being too liberal on local issues, and replaced him with a conservative who had been influential on the paper in the 1950s. Discouraged by the change in management, a large number of staffers quit.

Backed up by Mecom, a loyal L.B.J. supporter, Jones will probably steer the paper back into the middle of the road; if and when he gets the financial backing, he may buy the Chronicle himself.