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 asLucius Beebe. But settle there Beebe did, when he bought a long-defunctweekly, the Territorial Enterprise, in 1952 and resurrected it with aneditorial policy of “benevolent backwardness” and “low moral tone, highalcoholic content.” Recently, the onetime diarist of New York society,jaded at 58, has been edging away from Virginia City’s sagebrush andsaloons. Last week his unlikely association with the Old West was at anend. For some $40,000—a cut rate price for a weekly with a 6,785circulation —Beebe disposed of the Territorial Enterprise to a stubbyBroadway 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 lasttwo years. “The paper,” wrote Richards last week in an article set inthe newspaper’s archaic, Gay Nineties type, “will continue to violateevery accepted rule of journalism.” But Tell has some ideas of his own,plans to expand East. The paper already sells more than 2,000 weeklycopies east of the Mississippi, mostly to New Yorkers who rememberBeebe from his days as a café society columnist for the New York Herald Tribune.