Pants Afire

JUDGE PADBERG AND HIS JURY

St. Louis is confronted with a reeking,

stinking scandal, and Circuit Judge

Eugene L. Padberg is sitting right in

the middle of it. . . .

Whenever a lead editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch starts off like that, P-D staffers know it was turned out at white heat by ruddy, owlish Ralph Coghlan (rhymes with "oglin' "), an excitable Irishman who was trained in the great cut-'em-down Post-Dispatch school of Ex-Editors George Sibley Johns and the late Clark McAdams.

Editorialist Coghlan is usually indignant about something when he steams into the P-D's big stone building at 7 a. m., gets more so as the day's news rolls in. By the time the first edition is out, at 10, he is hopping around as though his pants were on fire. Says he: "When I find men in public office outraging public decency it makes me goddam mad."

Last week Ralph Coghlan's fiery.temper lifted him into one of the big jobs of U. S. journalism--editor of the Post-Dispatch's famed editorial page. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer II picked him to succeed thoughtful, slope-shouldered Charles Griffith Ross, 53, longtime (16 years) brilliant Washington correspondent who now returns to the capital as an associate editor. Editor Coghlan celebrated his elevation by flying into a particular rage over the freeing by a judge of one John W. ("Pat") Dunlavy on a charge of fraudulent voting. He simmered (in one edition): "For Dunlavy to go unpunished, citizens of St. Louis, is scandalous. It is putrid. Is it a crime in the United States of America to vote more than once at the same election? Is it a crime to be a repeater? Yes, it is. And of this crime Dunlavy is guilty as hell."

This was too much even for Publisher Pulitzer. In later editions "It is putrid" was omitted, and the last sentence changed to read, "If so, Dunlavy is as guilty as a man can be."

Because it is rich, respectable and often anti-New Deal, the Post-Dispatch has been increasingly damned of late by U. S. radicals. No longer does it have great crusading reporters like the late Paul Y. Anderson, the late John Tully Rogers. No longer does it have famed Managing Editor Oliver Kirby ("O. K.") Bovard, who resigned suddenly last August, now quietly raises apples on a nearby farm.

But last week's change on the editorial page indicated that the P-D's pants were, if not afire, getting a little warmer. Editor Coghlan is 42, Chicago-born, got his first newspaper job in 1920 on the Louisville Courier-Journal through a family friend, Assistant Publisher Wallace Hughes. Most of his early efforts at getting mad went up in smoke in the ornate Italian fireplace behind Hughes's desk. In 1922 he was summarily fired by Editorial Manager Arthur Krock for betraying the Courier-Journal's, bone-dry policy. (He let a wet letter slip into the letters column.)

Never a P-D legman, ireful Editor Coghlan often wanders down from the eighth to the third (city room) floor to wrangle happily with reporters. He takes a boisterous but effective part in the periodic poker games of the "Twelfth Street Country Club," a group of P-D oldtimers. When he built his present house in the Ladue district he asked his friends if they thought he was getting too near a creek. They said he was. He built there anyway. The creek made him mad, too--came right into his cellar.

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