The Press: Man Who Came to Dinner

To Samuel I. Newhouse, 65, the little-known press lord whose 14 daily newspapers form the nation’s fastest-growing newspaper chain, anything less than absolute possession of a paper is unthinkable. Sometimes newspapers resist his all-consuming appetite: it took him six years, from 1945 to 1951, to swallow the Jersey City Jersey Journal, and he is still trying diligently to enlarge the 15% bite he took in the Denver Post last June.* Right after Denver, hungry Sam Newhouse invited himself to a newspaper feast in Springfield, Mass. But by last week his New England dinner was biting back.

“Inglorious End.” Newhouse paid some $4,000,000 for what will eventually be a controlling 85% of Springfield’s three papers, the morning Union (circ. 81,000), the evening News (100,000) and the Sunday Republican (112,000). The papers are the succulent descendants of a family empire founded in 1824 by Samuel Bowles. Newhouse’s buy included possession rights to a 45% stock holding that belonged to the widow and four children of Sherman Hoar Bowles, the papers’ eccentric last dynastic proprietor, who died in 1952. But until 1967. voting rights to that 45% are held, by a voting trust controlled by trustees of the papers’ pension funds. (Bowles, though he fought unions, was a paternalistic employer who wanted his own employees to have a big stake in their paper.) Thus, along with another 15% actually owned by the pension fund, the trustees (all of them staff members) are in control.

No sooner did Newhouse start to move in than the trustee-directed papers began glowering at the man who presumably meant to eat them up. Cried the Union and the News in front-page editorials: “The work and pride of four generations is at an inglorious end.” When Newhouse asked to see the company books, Treasurer Sidney Cook, 56, spokesman for the current management, not only refused but barred him from the plant.

“Just as Stubborn.” Confronted with such stern resistance, Newhouse has sued in U.S. District Court in Boston for the right to examine the books. He does not deny a consuming curiosity about the papers’ pension fund, which finances employee benefits unparalleled in the U.S. press. A Springfield newspaper employee of 30 years can retire at 60 at full pay for life. To support such generosity, Newhouse says, the fund has assets in excess of $17 million.

“I do not want to impair the pension rights of any present employee,” says Newhouse, “but I want the profits hereafter to be used for the improvement of the physical plant and of the newspapers themselves.” As far as Custodian Cook is concerned, Newhouse can whistle somewhere else for a meal—at least until 1967. Said Cook last week: “Newhouse has met a bunch of New England Yankees up here who are just as stubborn as he is.”

*The Portland Oregonian, which is Newhouse-owned, has been struck by the American Newspaper Guild and printing-trades unions, along with the rival evening Oregon Journal, since Nov. 10, 1959. Both have lost heavily on circulation but are still appearing. Last week Donald R. Newhouse, 41, Samuel Newhouse’s cousin and business manager of the morning Oregonian, was wounded in the thigh by an unidentified assailant who fired a shotgun through a basement window.