The Press: Stern to Seattle

Three months ago, Oregon Publisher Sheldon F. Sackett was expanding like a pigtailer’s wad of bubble gum. In spectacular forays from his home base of Coos Bay, Ore., he grabbed the Vancouver (Wash.) Sun, annexed a weekly and a million-dollar printing plant in Portland, and bought the fading Seattle Star (TIME, April 14). Grandly and glibly, he talked of forging a western chain of Sackett-style dailies.

But by last week Sheldon Sackett was pinched for cash. He hastily unloaded the Portland weekly and implored Smith Davis, the Cleveland newspaper broker, to take the Seattle Star off his hands. This week Davis will head west with a buyer who can afford to absorb the Star’s $10,000 monthly losses while rebuilding the paper. The client: horn-rimmed David Stern III, 37, whose father, J. David Stern, once sold ads for the Seattle Star.

“Tommy” Stern, a hustling Harvard-man, learned his newspapering on his father’s New Dealing Philadelphia Record. In the war he worked on Pacific editions of Stars & Stripes, wrote Francis, the story of an Army mule. He lost his job as publisher of the Camden Courier and Post last February, when his father, bedeviled by an American Newspaper Guild strike, sold them and the Record, along with radio station WCAU.

Bitter, aging (61) Dave Stern vowed that he was out of the newspaper business for good, but with the $3,500,000 he cleared from the sale he could easily afford to grubstake Tommy on his Western adventure. Young Stern will pay Sackett $500,000 for the Star (netting Sackett a quick $100,000). He is also prepared to lay out $250,000 to build up the Star’s weary circulation (67,000).