The Press: Iowa Formula

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John. At 36, with the title of associate publisher, John Cowles is in effect the boss of the Des Moines Register & Tribune. That he is able, is largely due to his intelligent inquisitiveness. Home on holiday from Phillips Exeter 20 years ago small John often would go with his father to the Register & Tribune office, perch himself on the desk of his father's secretary, Agnes ("Mac") MacDonald. spout a stream of questions: "What does so-&-so do? Is he smart? . . . What is that voucher for? Why is there a 2% discount marked on it? . . . How much does newsprint cost? . . . How fast can the presses turn out 1,000 copies? . . ." He was still asking questions when he rushed through Harvard (cum laude) in three years while taking Professor Charles Townsend ("Copey") Copeland's famed English 12 course and working on the editorial staffs of all three campus publications—Crimson, Advocate, Lampoon. He asked questions when he accompanied his father to newspaper conventions, and when, after graduation in 1920, he started on the Register & Tribune as a plain reporter. He still asks questions wherever he goes, on his frequent visits to Manhattan and Washington. No corn-fed bumpkin, no dallying rich-man's-son. inquisitive John Cowles has stored behind his thick-lensed glasses and his moon face a wealth of essential fact. An excellence of perspective on top of a sound judgment makes him one of the most important young newspaper publishers in the land.

Individual accomplishments are difficult to classify in the Register & Tribune plant. But it was during John Cowles's ascendancy that circulation was upped from 114,000 to 280,000; that national features were added until the paper now offers 17, from Walter Lippmann to Waiter Winchell—more headliners than any other newspaper in the U. S.; that three radio stations were established; that profits mounted to a prodigious figure with 48% of revenue coming from circulation. Definitely credited to John Cowles is the Register & Tribune Syndicate, started eleven years ago and now serving some 40 features to clients in every state in the Union.

John now occupies his father's old office on the ground floor of the 13-story building in Des Moines's "Loop" He works hard, loves to play. He will bet on anything, any time, for any amount from a pack of cigarets up. His favorite gambling companion is his young brother "Mike." and when they play golf there are bets on nearly every stroke. John has a duffer's swing but manages to score about 90.

With his vivacious, black-eyed wife, Elizabeth Morley Bates Cowles. sister of Actress Sally Bates, John lives in a big. old red brick house, owned successively by two late Secretaries of Agriculture (Wilson's Meredith, Harding's Wallace). "But," says John Cowles, "I don't want anyone to think my ambition is ever to be secretary of Agriculture." The Cowleses entertain often and well. Their bedded guests within a fortnight included such an assortment as Herbert Hoover. Thomas S. Lamont, Nicholas Roosevelt. Philip Ludwell Jackson, ebullient publisher of the (Portland) Oregon Journal who rarely gets to the office before noon and. having an elderly secretary who cannot take shorthand, never dictates a letter.