The First 100 Years

The largest evening paper in the U.S. will be 100 years old this week. In Philadelphia, where "nearly everybody reads the Bulletin" the decorous "Old Lady of Filbert Street" was all set to celebrate. For her birthday party she took over Convention Hall so that her family of 1,700 could eat--but not drink--and make merry. Leathery Robert McLean, president of the Bulletin and of the A.P., would make a little speech. And rays from the star Algol, which take 100 light years to reach Philadelphia, would trip the switch that lighted the six-foot birthday cake.

As the rich and respected Bulletin remembers all too well, there was a time in Philadelphia when nearly everybody didn't read it. A onetime Pittsburgh newsboy named William L. McLean, father of Robert, changed Philadelphia's reading habits. When he borrowed $73,000 to buy the Bulletin in 1895, it was last (circ. 6,700) in a field of 13 dailies. A decade later it was out in front to stay (it now has over 800,000 a day). McLean put it there by giving Philadelphians what they seemed to want: all the news (no matter how trivial), sold in good time and told in good taste. Lest his Bulletin track mud into the neat row houses where it was a daily guest, he forbade it to muckrake. When the syndicated comic-strippers took to stripping their girls, he had his art room paint their clothes right back.

It is a familiar gag that "Only in Philadelphia would nearly everybody read the Bulletin" but there is not much truth to it. The Bulletin may be unspectacular, but it is a good newspaper. Lately, it has strangely refused to act its age. It recently underwent a drastic face-lifting, peeled off the old-fashioned headline types in favor of clean, ultra-modern fonts. Traditionally Republican, it has nevertheless been staunchly pro-Lilienthal, and has given Harry Truman some kindly back-pats. Since it bought the liberal Record, (TIME, Feb. 10), it has had an embarrassing wealth of columns, now prints Tom Stokes as often as David Lawrence, makes room for a host of others, from Billy Rose to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Some observers think the Bulletin's new lease on life was drawn by a Philadelphia lawyer. As general manager, suave Richard Slocum, former law partner of Owen J. Roberts, is the McLeans' right-hand man, gets along famously with their staffers as well. His sights are already set on the first objective in the Bulletin's second century: finding newsprint for the new Sunday edition (circ. 650,000 after only nine weeks' existence) to compete with Walter Annenberg's Sunday Inquirer (1,000,000).

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