Death in the Antiques Room

At 7:45 one morning last week, Reporter Malcolm Johnson was awakened by the jangle of the telephone. The boss was on the line. Edmond Bartnett, city editor of the New York Sun, wanted Reporter Johnson to hustle right down to the office, two hours earlier than usual. "Mr. Speed has an assignment for you," said Bartnett mysteriously. "It's a tough one."

Promptly at 9 o'clock, "Mike" Johnson, 45, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his investigation of waterfront crime (TIME, May 16), walked into the office of courtly, white-haired Executive Editor Keats* Speed, 70, editorial boss for 33 years of the staid, arch-conservative Sun. Said Speed in anguished accents: "I am taking you into my confidence because I have a nasty job to do. You must not breathe a word of this. We are being sold today, and I am an absolute wreck." Speed ordered stunned Reporter Johnson to lock himself in the musty, out-of-the-way office of the Antiques editor, there write the story of the death of the 116-year-old Sun.

Next day, only two hours after the staff had been told, the second oldest Manhattan paper/- ran its obituary under an eight-column banner on Page One: "The New York Sun has been sold to the New York World-Telegram . . . Today's issue will be the [Sun's) last. . ." Shrewd, dapper Roy W. Howard, 67, boss of the 19 Scripps-Howard papers, had bought the setting Sun as swiftly and silently as 19 years before he bought the Pulitzers' disintegrating World (TIME, March 9, 1931).

Profit & Loss. Howard had been secretly dickering for the Sun since last January. Whenever rumors of a sale circulated, Publisher Thomas W. Dewart doused them with a standard gag: "The Sun is for sale for 5-c- a copy, on any newsstand--and in no other way." The deal was completed on Dec. 1, but announcement was delayed so Sun staffers could enjoy Christmas. Estimated price for the Sun's "name, good will and circulation lists," but not its plant in Lower Manhattan: $2,000,000.

For Tom Dewart, 39, who came up the business side and inherited the publisher's desk on his brother's death four years ago, the decision to sell was a cold question of profit & loss. The Sun was in the red. In his shutdown notice, Dewart blamed rising costs, notably "union demands." The mechanical unions and the Sun's independent editorial union bitterly replied that they had received no raises since 1948, had not been asked to take a cut. There was a more important reason than rising costs: the lackluster Sun had stood still journalistically for decades. At its death, circulation was 261,000, barely 4,000 more than in 1926; it was eighth in Manhattan's circulation field of nine. The combined circulations of the World-Telegram (342,000) and the Sun, Publisher Dewart said, were "enough to assure the economic stability of one newspaper but not enough for two . . ." Advertisers, sensing the Sun's slow eclipse, had dropped more than 1,500,000 lines in 1949. In a decade, its share of the New York advertising cake had been sliced from one-tenth to one-twentieth.

Apples & Whiskers. Founded in 1833 by Printer Benjamin Day, the fresh, frequently sensational morning Sun was the first successful penny paper in an era of stodgy 6-c- dailies. In 1835, circulation climbed to a dizzying 19,000 (biggest in the U.S.) after it reported the astonishing discovery of "man-bats" on the moon. The Sun's playful hoax won it readers without losing their confidence; nine years later, it ran another famed hoax by Edgar Allan Poe about the first transatlantic balloon trip.

By 1868, when Charles Anderson Dana bought the Sun for $175,000, circulation had soared to 43,000. In 29 years under Dana, ex-managing editor of Greeley's Tribune and onetime Assistant Secretary of War, the Sun shone brighter than ever before or since, was famed as the "newspaperman's newspaper." Under Editor Dana, everything was exciting news: "A new kind of apple, a crying child on the curb, the exact weight of a candidate for President, the latest style in whiskers . . ." When people objected to the Sun's reporting of murder, scandal, gossip and graft, Dana tartly retorted: "I have always felt that whatever the Divine Providence permitted to occur, I was not too proud to report." City Editor John Bogart's definition became even more famous: "When a man bites a dog, that is news." To gather and write the new "human interest" stories, the Sun corralled such topflight reporters as Jacob Riis, Arthur Brisbane, Richard Harding Davis, Will Irwin, Irvin S. Cobb and Frank Ward O'Malley.

With his vigorous news pages, Dana ran blistering editorials against Boss Tweed, the Credit Mobilier and the Whisky Ring. Yet the Sun also sentimentally assured eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."

On Dana's orders, the Sun missed one big piece of news that Divine Providence permitted to occur. While competitors took columns, the Sun took only ten words to report an era's end in 1897: "Charles Anderson Dana, editor of the Sun, died yesterday afternoon." Under able editors, the Sun carried on until 1916, but the great fire slowly died. Then Frank Munsey, chain-store magnate and journalistic )luebeard, bought the paper. He folded Dana's evening edition, moved the morning edition to the evening and on his death in 1925 bequeathed the fading paper (and his Telegram) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. William T. Dewart, Munsey's general manager, bought both papers in 1926, and the next year sold the Telegram to Roy Howard, setting the pattern followed by his son Tom 23 years later.

Habits & Tropical Fish. Under the Dewarts, nothing changed. Executive Editor Speed continued to "mister" his staffers, including City Editor Bartnett, though 60% of them had worked for the Sun for 15 years or more. When he entered the museumlike quiet of the too-neat city room, Speed snuffed out his cigarette because that was the rule in Mr. Munsey's day, and "habits are hard to break."

There were other habits that were harder to break: the Sun annually reprinted the "Yes, Virginia" editorial, ran such departments as Dogs, Cats, and Tropical Fish, never deviated from its dignified, colorless makeup. The Republican Sun's editorial page seemed to some to be against almost every social welfare plan since Virginia's Santa Claus. To its credit, the Sun printed plenty of A.P. news and prided itself on its financial, art and education pages, but it pinched pennies covering local news and often did not move as fast as it should. Once, when a World-Telegram reporter rushed through the Sun's city room to cover a stabbing, an amazed Sunman asked him if he was Frank Ward O'Malley because "nobody had hurried [here] since O'Malley left."

Night & Day. The new World-Telegram and the Sun got off to a fast start with a first-day run of 700,000 copies. Besides the jawbreaking name, the W-T-&-S retained both of the familiar logotypes: the Telly's lighthouse steadfastly dispelled the gloom of night while the Sun's sun heralded the break of day.

The combined paper quickly signed up the Sun's Drama Columnist Ward Morehouse, Sport Columnist Grantland Rice, Paragraphs H. I. ("Hi") Phillips. Columnist George Sokolsky* switched his column to Hearst's Journal-American; Pulitzer Prizewinning Cartoonist Rube Goldberg also jumped to the JA. Such by liners as Reporter Mike Johnson, 82-year-old Henry McBride, dean of U.S. art critics, and Washington Correspondent Phelps Adams would have little trouble landing jobs. But heartbroken Executive Editor Speed was "looking for a hobby," and most of the Sun's staff of 1,200 editorial, business and mechanical employees were looking for work.

*Great-nephew of Poet John Keats. /- Oldest: The New York Post (founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801). *Who also writes editorials for Hearst's New York Mirror.

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