The Press: Hitched to the Star

In 1861, when Abraham Lincoln had spoken the last words of his first inaugural address, he leaned over and handed his copy down to a young newsman named Crosby Noyes, told him to get it set in type. Washingtonians have been depending on the Noyes-edited Washington Evening Star ever since. Rich, reserved and respectable, the newspaper has become as solid a Washington institution as the

Smithsonian, and every bit as cluttered.

Last week, for the third time in fourscore years, the Star got a new editor. For the first time, he was not a Noyes—but sober, cautious Benjamin Mosby McKelway, 51, was unmistakably one of Noyes’s boys.

Onward & Upward. Ben McKelway, brother of blond, bland St. Clair McKelway of the New Yorker and Hollywood, has risen steadily in the Star’s white-tiled, Gothic pile at 11th and Pennsylvania Avenue ever since patriarchal Theodore W. Noyes, its second editor, hired him as a reporter in 1921. Next month he will move into Noyes’s triangular, Victorian top-floor office.

Compared to Scripps-Howard’s tabloid Daily News, to “Cissie” Patterson’s raucous Times-Herald and even to Eugene Meyer’s Post, the Evening Star seems to many readers as stodgy as the Congressional Record. It is second only to the Times-Herald in circulation (with a record 215,000) and among the five most adladen papers in the nation.

Cave-Dwellers’ Paper. The Star caters to the “cave-dwellers”—the permanent residents, scorning what McKelway calls the “short timers.” The cave-dwellers get their names in the paper regularly, at social gatherings and community club meetings. They can’t do without the oldfashioned, fussily-detailed front-page cartoons, drawn in familiar, familial style by 77-year-old Clifford K. Berryman and his son Jim. And the best-read feature is Charles E. Thracewell’s This & That column, which is about birds and bugs.

“The Star,” says McKelway, “is an old lady, and it would be unseemly for her to turn a somersault on the Mall. I don’t think we’re stodgy. Mr. Noyes used to say, ‘Let them say we are stodgy and dull. At least, they know that our editorial columns cannot be bought.’ “