Kentucky Team

On his Louisville newspaper's 40th birthday, fire-breathing, shaggy-browed Colonel "Marse Henry" Watterson penned an editorial prophecy: "The time will probably never come when the Courier-Journal will be exempt from the accusations of corrupt motives, which invariably assail it whatever it says or does."

That 1908 Wattersonianism was more of a boast than a lament. In his own rambunctious time, which lasted 50 years, Marse Henry's paper was branded as a tool of the Freedmen's Bureau, of the Gold Bugs, of the brewers and distillers. Never batting his one good eye, Watterson roared right back at his accusers.

Last week, with Marse Henry dead 24 years, his Courier-Journal was still not exempt from accusations: it was (with its afternoon sister paper, the Times) a monopoly; it was left-wing Democratic, as Marse Henry, no left-winger, never dreamed it would be. But the paper still had what Watterson had given it: the strongest, though not the most popular, journalistic voice in the South.

Get-Up & Go. The present editor made no pretense of being a Watterson. But well-mannered, well-intentioned George Barry Bingham, at 39 still boyishly handsome, had able lieutenants. The ablest of them, squirrel-cheeked Publisher Mark Foster Ethridge, is full of go-ahead schemes. The Washington bureau was expanding ; a fine new building would replace the ancient post office the papers now live in, four blocks south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Such shop talk flowed as freely as the punch at a party last week in Louisville's stately old Pendennis Club. Blue-eyed Barry Bingham was host to 107 employes who, like him (he was a Navy commander), were home from the wars.* Mark Ethridge, back from his presidential mission to the Balkans, dropped in for a drink.

From the Bottom. At any Courier-Journal family reunion, Bingham could feel at home. His father, rich Judge Robert Worth Bingham, had bought the paper in 1918--and had promptly plumped for the League of Nations, thereby losing Marse Henry as editor. The Judge wanted his son to start at the bottom, so after Harvard Barry earnestly filled a succession of jobs on both the papers and WHAS, the Binghams' radio station. In 1937 the Judge died in office as Franklin Roosevelt's Ambassador to Britain, and Barry Bingham inherited all three enterprises.

The elder Bingham had resorted to insurance offers and movie-star contests to double the C-J's circulation; it had become strictly a business-office paper. It needed a Mark Ethridge to lift its editorial chin. In 1936 it got him, for a reported $25,000 a year.

No More Gags. Ethridge's title then was general manager. But he knew that it was the news, not the advertising, that makes the paper. He hunted up crack newsmen, paid them well, invested heavily in editorial promotion, cut out the circulation gags & stunts. Said he: "You can't have $75-a-week editors and $400-a-week business managers and expect to meet the competition."

Today the dignified, well-dressed Courier-Journal still hews to its New Deal line, stoutly upholds Negro rights, campaigns for group medicine. It will now have to get along without one bright star in its prewar galaxy: brilliant, Anglophilic Herbert Agar, Pulitzer Prizewinner (The People's Choice), who became editor in 1940, fought hard for U.S. intervention in the war.* After more than three years in the Navy, a commander assigned to Ambassador John Winant as assistant, Agar was home in New York last week. He will go back to London, and to Winant's staff, in civilian clothes.

* Marse Henry, also an interventionist, issued a famed editorial battle cry in September 1914: "To Hell with the Hapsburgs and the Hohen-zollerns!"

* Marse Henry, in the Civil War, put out the Rebel, a sort of Confederate Stars & Stripes. Its covered-wagon print shop was seldom more than one jump ahead of the damyankees.

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