Hide-&-Seek in Springfield

Hulking, whisper-voiced Sherman Hoar Bowles, 56, is a big man in Springfield. Mass. As lantern-jawed as his cousin Chester, he is a successful publisher, the head of Atlas Tack Corp., a real-estate operator, a dabbler in airlines--and a man who thrives on trouble. He has been sued by the Treasury for gold-hoarding, pursued by squads of tax collectors, stalked by labor unions. All have found him a baffling adversary, but an affable one.

Like three generations of Bowleses (all named Sam) before him, shrewd Sherman runs the venerable Springfield Republican (est. 1824, now the weakest in his four-paper monopoly). Last week the Republican and its sisters, the morning & evening Union and the Daily News, were shut up tight, and Springfield (pop. 150,000) was without a daily for the first time in 102 years. Cause: a squabble over a hiring clause which kept Bowles and the International Typographical Union from signing a contract.

For months, another union, the C.I.O.

American Newspaper Guild, had been trying to find somebody to bargain with in Springfield. Like Bowles's 517 employes, the Guild was sure Bowles was boss. But his three publishing companies had been ordered dissolved by 'the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and Bowles swore up & down that that left him just an advertising salesman. Fortnight ago, the NLRB told him to quit kidding and bargain with the Guild.

But the bargaining never got started.

Next day, Bowles refused to sign up with the I.T.U., and his printers walked out, took the stereotypers and pressmen with them.

Last week Sherman Bowles handed all his nonstriking help a week's pay for no work, said in a press release that it was "impossible to do business with the I.T.U." But nobody in Springfield was surprised to see him doing business with bespectacled Robert C. Kirkpatrick, the union's international representative. He was already calling him "Bob." And when Bob got a troublesome ear ailment, Bowles arranged for him to visit a clinic. So far he hadn't asked Bob up to the big Bowles house on Crescent Hill, which the sheriff had just sold to the state in settlement of a court judgment.

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