Newspapers: A Family Enterprise

Tradition has it at the New York Times that for 65 years the chair set aside for the boss has had an invisible name plate bearing the legend, “Reserved for Family.” It is a tradition that dates all the way back to the turn of the century when Adolph Ochs, a printer turned publisher, hocked his Chattanooga Times to take a flyer at running a paper in the big town.

What Publisher Ochs got when he bought the New York Times was a property that had been described precisely by a contemporary critic as “the most picturesque old ruin among the newspapers of America.” Its circulation was an anemic 9,000 and it was losing $1,000 a day. It took just four years of Ochs’s energetic skill to get his purchase to show a profit.

Shaping the Age. Though much of his own attention was concentrated on the countinghouse, Ochs also had a talent for filling his editorial offices with some of the legendary greats of journalism. From 1904 to 1932, Ochs’s news columns were controlled by Managing Editor Carr Van Anda, the sort of man who could decide for himself that Britain’s great new liner Titanic was not as unsinkable as all the proud publicity claimed. While other editors doubted the authenticity of the first SOS, Van Anda concluded that Titanic was indeed sinking. He deployed his staff, and the Times’s superlative coverage made newspaper history. With such talent to help him, Ochs built a great paper that became the country’s most reliable record of the world’s daily changes.

Ochs had no sons, and when he died in 1935 it was only natural that his daughter Iphigene’s husband should inherit command. Arthur Hays Sulzberger presided over the institution with a steady hand, nudged its editorial stance toward more depth in news coverage, more interpretation and background on the events shaping the age. When Sulzberger retired from active control in 1961, he and his wife picked Daughter Marian Dryfoos’ husband Orvil to run the show. After Dryfoos died in May, Sulzberger had to choose his successor again. And last week he picked his son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.

To Judy’s Show. The new Times publisher owes his nickname, “Punch,” to his father’s uninhibited delight in composing light rhymes. When young Arthur was born, it seemed proper that he be linked in verse with his youngest sister Judith. As his father put it: “He came to play at Punch to Judy’s endless show.”

Schooled at Loomis and Columbia, and twice married, young Punch did two stretches with the Marines in two wars. He served as a cub reporter on the Milwaukee Journal and put in tours at three Times bureaus abroad for short, unnoticeable hitches. He came home to handle chores for his father in the publisher’s office—in-plant efficiency and civil defense—then took on the job of assistant treasurer. At 37 he leapfrogged to president and publisher.

If his on-the-job training is not yet complete, the new Times boss can count on a seasoned hierarchy.* And Punch can certainly count on the support of the board. Presided over by his father, the board includes Punch himself and a strong family cast: his mother Iphigene, his sisters Ruth and Marian, and his brother-in-law Richard Cohen. Outsiders on the board include Vice President Bancroft, retired World Banker Eugene Black, and Carr Van Anda’s son Paul. The family also holds two-thirds of the voting stock. Patriarch Sulzberger announced the masthead changes last week with understandable assurance. “It can be truly said,” he said, “that the Times is a family enterprise.”

* Only major change: the resignation of Vice President and General Manager Amory Bradford, who turned in an award-losing performance as spokesman for New York publishers during the long newspaper strike this year. He will be replaced by Harding Bancroft, an able lawyer and onetime diplomat who has been the Times’s secretary since 1957.