Genus: Successful Crank

DAMNED OLD CRANK: A SELF-PORTRAIT OF E. W. SCRIPPS (259 pp.)--Edited by Charles R. McCabe--Harper ($3.50).

All one spring night in 1878, a lanky, redheaded American tourist from Detroit walked the streets of London thinking about life and trying to decide what to do with his own. At 23, Edward Wyllis Scripps was already city editor of his brother's Detroit Evening News, but that night he decided that it was folly to work for anybody but himself. He also threw overboard the idea that all men were created equal: "Sadly I acknowledged to myself that the world was composed of a very small class of slave drivers and a very, very large class of slaves."

By the time young Scripps turned in after dawn, he had firmly twisted one of Christ's sayings to his own future uses: "It is more profitable to give wages, than to receive them." Some weeks later, sitting in the Colosseum in Rome on a moonlit night, he extended his credo: "Let the other fellow have all the glory. Let him occupy the place in the limelight. For me, I only care to have the power."

The Golden Touch. Damned Old Crank is a hodge-podge of Scripps's autobiographical recollections, and one of the most eccentric handbooks to success ever written by a moneymaking man.

Scripps fathered the chain-newspaper idea: in his day, he bought or founded 49 newspapers. When he died of apoplexy one day in 1926, 71-year-old E. W. Scripps was head of the Scripps-Howard Newspapers (24), founder-boss of the United Press and of a whole clutch of lesser enterprises. But anybody looking for an orderly record of Scripps's empire-building--or for an inspirational credo to put into the hands of journalism students--had better look elsewhere.

Scripps was born on an Illinois farm, but he never let hayseed get into his hair. He was "the laziest boy in the county" and proud of it. Though he flopped at woodchopping and milking, he was a whiz when it came to moneymaking. He was still a teen-ager when he organized a wood & coal business and set teams of schoolboys to doing farm work for him. While his pals labored, Edward perched on a rail fence or reclined in the shade reading a book.

He hated school, liked the poetic parts of the Bible, but had no interest in religion or "that stupid automaton, the preacher." Work he always hated ("Never do anything today that you can put off till tomorrow"), but the golden touch never deserted him. When he left the farm to go to Detroit at 18, it was to learn the drugstore business. He quit at the.end of the first week when he learned his apprentice wage: 50-c- a week. Within a year he was circulation manager of the Detroit News and, thanks to his commissions, was making more than the owners.

Scripps took his first drink on his 21st birthday. For the next 25 years, "I believe that day and night I was never entirely out from under the influence of alcohol." He insists that he often consumed more than a gallon a day, smoked "40 large" cigars to boot. His excesses failed to cloud his business shrewdness, but at 46, "the flesh on my arms and legs had shrunk so that when I was stripped ... I resembled one of those ridiculous little figures that the artists paint and draw as brownies." Warned by doctors, "I did reduce my tippling to two quarts a day." Later that year, persuaded that he would otherwise go blind, Scripps gritted his teeth and went on the wagon.

The Common Touch. Much of Damned Old Crank is heavily sententious, more often oversimplified and contradictory. Scripps was always on the side of the workingman "right or wrong," but believed that poverty was "the wages of intellectual indolence." The best "cureall" he could think of for U.S. ills in 1917 was a $3-a-day minimum wage; he was sure it would do away with "slums and sordid vice" and rejuvenate society in general. Certain that no good newspaperman could be a gentleman, he nonetheless regarded journalism as a form of "statesmanship."

Scripps seems to have succeeded by hunch and some intuitive common touch. When he made "an innocent upstart" named Roy Howard general news manager of the United Press at 24, he did it, he claimed, largely because Howard's grandfather had tended the tollgate on the road Scripps used to travel to court his future wife. The fact that Roy Howard was also one of the ablest young newspapermen in captivity could not have escaped Scripps, but he was not the man to stress it.

In Damned Old Crank, Scripps tells how Howard, the man who would one day run the Scripps empire, struck him at their first meeting: "Gall was written all over his face. It was in every tone and every word he voiced. There was ambition, self-respect and forcefulness oozing out of every pore of his body." The damned old crank might have been looking at himself in a mirror.

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