The Press: Kansas Bite

Since he saved enough money as a reporter to buy his first newspaper 41 years ago, shrewd Oscar Stauffer, 69, has bought twelve small dailies (total circ. 110,000) and three radio stations,* chiefly in Kansas and the Midwest. Last week, at a single stroke, Stauffer took over the vaster domain (total circ. 5,000,000) of another self-made publisher, Kansas’ late Senator Arthur Capper. Reported purchase price: $7,300,000.

Stauffer’s buy gave him a monopoly in the state capital as well as the surrounding region’s only morning paper, the Topeka Daily Capital (circ. 64,304), which since 1941 has shared presses, quarters and business departments with Stauffer’s own Topeka afternoon paper, the State Journal (circ. 23,471). Also in the package: another daily, the Kansas City Kansan (circ. 29,583), six farm periodicals, two national magazines, Capper’s Farmer (circ. 1,462,513) and Household (circ. 2,578,797), plus Topeka’s radio and TV station WIBW and Kansas City’s radio station KCKN.

“Dead Horse.” The Capper publications, which spent much of their space plugging the Senator’s political interests, had found the going rough, even before his death in 1951. Since then, they have been further battered in a fight for control between two management factions. While the battle dragged on in court, Manhattan Newspaper Broker Vincent J. Manno (TIME, Sept. 7, 1953) persuaded the stockholders to forget their differences and sell out to Stauffer, who promised that “general policies and personnel will undergo little change.”

Editorialized Editor-Publisher W. L. (“Young Bill”) White in the Emporia Gazette: “What Mr. Stauffer has purchased is a dead horse of fantastic proportions, and his bill of sale has bought him largely the right to use his brains and energy to try to revive it. Mr. Stauffer, however, is one of the shrewdest businessmen in Kansas. He has never yet bit off anything without knowing clearly in advance exactly how it should be chewed.”

Publisher Stauffer was born in Hope, Kans., where his father had taken over a general store from the father of President Eisenhower before the Eisenhowers moved to Denison, Texas, where Ike was born.† At the University of Kansas one of Stauffer’s closest friends was Classmate Alf M. Landon, and Stauffer headed a Landon-for-President committee in 1936.

$1 to $500. Stauffer cubbed on the Emporia Gazette, became a reporter and copyreader on the Kansas City Star, where he worked five years. Then in 1915 he plunked his savings into the purchase of two struggling weeklies in Peabody, Kans., merging them into the successful Gazette-Herald. But Stauffer’s greatest coup in Peabody was to buy land options at the going rate of $1 an acre. When oil was struck, some of the $1 options were worth $500, and by 1924 Stauffer had a kitty of at least $100,000 to buy newspapers in earnest. Primarily a businessman, Publisher Stauffer chooses his editors carefully, lets them freely speak their editorial minds.

In buying Capper Publications Inc., Publisher Stauffer was prompted by signs that his empire may prove a dynasty. Son John, 28, is editor of the family’s Newton Kansan; Stanley, 36, who was publisher of the Santa Maria (Calif.) Times for five years, is assistant publisher of the Topeka State Journal and in line to succeed his father.

* Arkansas City (Kans.) Traveler, Grand Island (Neb.) Independent, Independence (Mo.) Examiner, Maryville (Mo.) Daily Forum, Nevada (Mo.) Daily Mail, Newton (Kans.) Kansan, Pittsburg (Kans.) Headlight and Sun, Santa Maria (Calif.) Times, Shawnee (Okla.) News Star, Topeka (Kans.) State Journal, York (Neb.) News-Times, and stations KSOK, Arkansas City, Kans., KSEK, Pittsburg, Kans., KGFF, Shawnee, Okla. † For other news of the President’s birthplace, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS.