In the weekly Montgomery County, Pa. Breeze:

SAFETY MAJOR ISSUE OF SAFETY COUNCIL

Race in Chicago

Soon after Publisher John Shively Knight bought the Chicago Daily News in 1944, he stood in the plaza in front of the News building with Executive Editor Basil L. Walters and eyed the bubbling fountain in its center. Said "Stuffy" Walters : "When we pay off the mortgage, I'll take a bath in that fountain." Replied

Jack Knight: "You'll have whiskers down to here."

By last week Stuffy Walters had reason to hope that he could jump into the fountain pool with no beard at all. Barely five years and four months after Knight added the slipping News to his thriving chain,* it had paid off nearly $8,700,000 of its $12,500,000 mortgage, had a commanding lead over Hearst's rival Chicago Herald-American in advertising, and hoped shortly to pass the Hearstpaper in circulation and become Chicago's biggest afternoon paper.

When Knight climbed into the saddle, the News was trotting along with 426,644 readers, 58,000 behind the Hearstpaper. In five years, the Herald-American has cantered to a circulation peak of 548,000, but the News has almost closed up the gap, is now only 6,000 behind.

Privately, Hearstlings thought they knew why the News was gaining on them. In the Herald-American, Chicagoans were still getting the Hearstian formula of sex, sensation, antivivisection and Mac-Arthur-for-President. Herald-American staffers were sure that they could do better by dropping the canned crusades in favor of more local news. That was just what Knight's News was giving Chicago: fresh, warmhearted, local-angled stories, sometimes crusading, almost always lively. With the playing down of its foreign coverage and the jazzing up of its typography, the paper had lost some of its prestige among old News readers, but it was more salable than ever.

Under Knight and Walters, the News had exposed the defeated Republican state machine's payoffs to small-town editors (TIME, May 9). It had successfully plumped for reform Mayor Martin Kennelly, and started a cleanup of the shocking Skid Row conditions (TIME, Aug. 29). For readers whose hair had turned to silver, the News had recently added a steady feature called "The Golden Years."

The News had also been one of the first to spot the growth of religious interest, had serialized Fulton Oursler's Greatest Story Ever Told on Page One (TiME, Oct. 10). Last week Chicagoans were talking about another News series: the inside story of Alcoholics Anonymous, written by staffers who belong to A.A.

Feeling the hot breath of the News on its neck, the Herald-American hired a new circulation manager, Donald J. Walsh, 50, who once held the same job on the News and later on the Sun (now the Sun-Times). But many Chicago newsmen did not think that the Knight-ridden News could be outgalloped. In a matter of months, they expected the News to pass the Herald-American.

* The others: the Akron Beacon-Journal, the Miami Herald, the Detroit Free Press.

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