The Press: Working Journalist

Roy Wilson Howard was a natty little man with a predilection for splendid dress—fresh boutonnieres every day, violently checked pistachio shirts and bow ties of the same stuff. His taste for work was just as pronounced. “I’m not a candidate for the funeral director yet,” he said in 1960, putting aside his last active title with the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain and taking the relatively inactive post of chairman of the executive committee. But he continued to go down to the office every day just the same. There, one afternoon last week, in his 81st year, a heart attack ended Roy Howard’s 62-year career in journalism.

“Gall All Over.” Success in that career came early because Howard worked hard to get it. Whatever he got, he owed to no other man. The son of an Irish railroad brakeman and a tollgate keeper’s daughter, he never went beyond high school. As a youth in Indianapolis, he rose before dawn to carry the Star, delivered the News every afternoon. In between, he filed so many space-rate stories for the News that the paper put him on a reporter’s salary ($8 a week) to save money. Ambition led him to St. Louis in 1905, but when Joseph Pulitzer’s Post-Dispatch did not promote him rapidly enough to suit him, Roy Howard, then 22, quit.

Howard’s association with the news paper group that today bears his name began that same year, when he went to work as news editor of the Cincinnati Post. Within two years, his aggressive independence had attracted the attention of Edward Wyllis Scripps, who had just added a wire service, United Press, to the numerous papers he owned. Scripps called Howard to his California ranch to look him over, and Howard appeared in his gaudiest regalia. The way Howard recalled the meeting, Scripps shoved his glasses up on his forehead, took a long, searching look and exclaimed, “My God, another little one!” Replied Howard (according to Howard): “Yes, but maybe a good one this time.”

Scripps’s later recollection of the facedown with Howard does not conflict: “His manner was forceful, and the reverse from modest. Gall was written all over his face. It was in every tone and every word he voiced. There was ambition, self-respect and forcefulness oozing out of every pore of his body . . . However, so completely and exuberantly frank was he that it was impossible for me to feel any resentment on account of his cheek.” Resentment, indeed. Scripps came to value Howard’s talents and insouciance so much that in 1912, at 29, Howard became the U.P.’s first president.

Better than command, Howard liked the excitement of the story hunt, and it led him all over the globe. He took a newsman’s wry pride in having scooped the world on the signing of the World War I armistice, which he happened to report four days before it actually took place. Having seen what was apparently a government dispatch and having relied on an unimpeachable source—Admiral Henry B. Wilson, commanding U.S. naval forces in France—Howard never regretted his premature dispatch: “No real reporter could have or would have done otherwise.”

The Important Date. In due time, Howard was elevated to full command of the Scripps organization, displacing in 1922 Scripps’s first partner, Milton McRae, in the name of the chain. After Scripps died in 1926, the chain changed too. The pro-Democrat, pro-labor views of Edward Wyllis Scripps gave way to moderate Republicanism, although in 1932 and 1936 Howard swung the newspaper chain behind Franklin Roosevelt. Until this Goldwater year, Roosevelt was the last Democratic presidential candidate the chain endorsed; the mainstream Republican tone was maintained by editorials sent out from New York headquarters.

Thanks in large part to Howard, Scripps-Howard is in excellent shape to survive his departure. Sound business management and the delegation of considerable authority to editors have maintained the 86-year-old organization as the most enduring and successful group of newspapers in the U.S. The U.P., having absorbed Hearst’s International News Service in 1958 to be come U.P.I., is larger and stronger than ever. And to his son Jack, 54, who succeeded him in 1953 as president, Roy Howard bequeathed the kind of working newsman’s creed that he himself followed all his life: “No date on the calendar is as important as tomorrow.”