The Press: Appointments to Chicago

Marshall Field’s Chicago morning-paper-in-progress (TIME, Sept. 22) last week made important additions to its general staff for the Big Push—due to begin in mid-November—against Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, America First’s Greatest Newspaper. The staff announced this week by Publisher Silliman Evans:

Assistant to the publisher: Frank W. Taylor, big, 54-year-old ex-managing editor of the St. Louis Star-Times. Ranking high among top-flight U.S. editors, Frank Taylor brings to Marshall Field’s paper his invaluable 27-year experience in fighting a tough, richer rival. (When he quit the Star-Times four months ago, the powerful St. Louis Post-Dispatch respectfully acknowledged him “Enemy No. 1.”)

Editor (at a rumored $35,000 a year): redhaired, pouchy-eyed, 41-year-old Rex Smith, managing editor of Newsweek and man about Manhattan nightclubs since 1937, before that reporter and foreign correspondent.

Managing editor: beefy, stogie-smoking, 47-year-old George (“Ash”) De Witt, fired three weeks ago (the second time in five years) from the managing editorship of the Washington Times-Herald. His qualifications: 19 years’ Chicago experience with Hearst’s now-defunct Chicago Herald & Examiner; a plugging talent for local news; five years’ experience under Colonel McCormick’s temperamental cousin Eleanor (“Cissy”) Patterson, publisher of the Times-Herald.

Circulation director: Hearst’s Boston circulation manager, Jack Stenbuck, tough, 41-year-old Hearst veteran—a choice showing healthy respect for Chicago as a place of bitter circulation wars.

Head of the Washington office: Bascom Timmons, Texas crony of Silliman Evans and Jesse Jones, now representative of eleven papers from Texas to Massachusetts.

The Marshall Field paper this week announced a $10,000 name contest, signed up its first features (William Shirer’s best-selling Berlin Diary, Samuel Grafton’s daily column, I’d Rather Be Right), picked a slogan (“An Honest Newspaper”). Already signed for U.P. and the Herald Tribune’s Washington and New York wires, Publisher Evans may have a hard time signing up with A. P. The spare Chicago morning A.P. membership (formerly held by the Chicago Herald & Examiner) is owned by Hearst.