Same Old Smith

Saber-tongued Harold Ickes went to work last week at a trade he had often reviled. Hanging out his shingle as a syndicated columnist (97 U.S. newspapers), the old Curmudgeon festooned it with promises: to tell no lies, to pull no punches, to abstain ("unless compelled by events") from promoting a third party. "I have stipulated," Harold Ickes warned all & sundry, "that I may neither be expurgated nor amended."

Ninety-seven editors let the warning pass, knowing full well that he could be expurgated like anybody else, if he broke the laws of libel or good taste. But red-haired Paul C. Smith, the brassy, crusading wonder boy of the San Francisco

Chronicle, who cannot abide prima donnas on his staff, was not having any.

Editor Smith picked up the phone, demanded that the New York Post syndicate tell its new man to rewrite his maiden column. The syndicate said no. Smith canceled his contract, hung up, batted out a front-page manifesto: "It would be impossible to guarantee to print every word that Mr. Ickes might see fit to write."

By this and other tokens, San Franciscans knew last week that Paul Smith had come back from the war unchanged. Six hours after Pearl Harbor, 33-year-old Paul Smith left his job as general manager of George Cameron's Chronicle, flew to Washington to take over the Navy's press section, with a lieutenant commander's two and a half stripes on his sleeve. From there he had bounced 1) to OWI, as domestic news director; 2) to the Marines, as a private; 3) to combat in the Pacific (Bougainville, Guadalcanal, Guam) as a lieutenant; 4) back to the Navy, as a commander; 5) to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, as a press-relations handyman.

Between bounces he managed to keep a firm, remote-control hand on the San Francisco Chronicle. In the four months since he returned, he has pulled and hauled to give his paper a "global viewpoint," while cooking up ways to cut down the Hearst Examiner's big (243,000-to-166,000) circulation lead.

Last week, gathering manpower for his campaign, he staged a staff raid on the Examiner. Hearstlings Edward W. McQuade, city editor; Alvin Hyman, top rewrite man, and Richard V. Hyer, legman specializing in crime reporting, walked out to go to work for Paul Smith's Chronicle. The rattled Examiner hastily scattered pay raises to keep the rest of its staff. But Smith boasted that his new recruits had not changed sides for money. "They simply are going to work for an honest newspaper," he cracked, "so they can live with themselves and their children."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.