The Press: Eastward Ho

Except for the fact that it boasts one saloon for every 34 residents. Virginia City, Nev., a town of 515 atop the exhausted Comstock Lode, always seemed a wildly improbable place for so determined a dandy as Lucius Beebe. But settle there Beebe did, when he bought a long-defunct weekly, the Territorial Enterprise, in 1952 and resurrected it with an editorial policy of “benevolent backwardness” and “low moral tone, high alcoholic content.” Recently, the onetime diarist of New York society, jaded at 58, has been edging away from Virginia City’s sagebrush and saloons. Last week his unlikely association with the Old West was at an end. For some $40,000—a cut rate price for a weekly with a 6,785 circulation —Beebe disposed of the Territorial Enterprise to a stubby Broadway promoter named Jack Tell, 51.

Tell will let Managing Editor Robert L. Richards, 50, go on running the Enterprise as he has run it for the last two years. “The paper,” wrote Richards last week in an article set in the newspaper’s archaic, Gay Nineties type, “will continue to violate every accepted rule of journalism.” But Tell has some ideas of his own, plans to expand East. The paper already sells more than 2,000 weekly copies east of the Mississippi, mostly to New Yorkers who remember Beebe from his days as a café society columnist for the New York Herald Tribune.