The Press: Iowa Formula

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William Wesley Waymack, 46, associate editor, has been in charge of the editorial page since Editor Ingham's virtual retirement. Like the Register & Tribune's famed Cartoonist Jay Norwood ("Ding") Darling, now on leave of absence as Chief of U. S. Biological Survey, he was hired from the Sioux City Journal, He is reputed the best amateur candy maker in the Midwest.

Basil L. ("Stuffy") Walters, 39, short, barrel-shaped (100-lb.) and genial, is managing editor of both the Register (morning) and Tribune (evening). Between his two staffs, entirely separate for each paper, has grown a genuine news rivalry, essential in a city where there is no other local competition.

Joyce Swan, beaming promotion manager, sees to such enterprises as giving thousands of Iowa schoolchildren free rides in the newspaper's airplane.

Vernon Pope is in charge of the rotogravure, which, instead of being the usual Sunday dump for left-over news pictures, is used as a sustained circulation getter. A prime factor in the Cowles formula is to develop long picture series which will run for a dozen weeks or more.

And always on hand is Gardner Cowles. He comes to his office, reads the papers or has them read to him, listens to reports, smokes countless cigarets, prods his sons for circulation and more circulation. Two "G. C." maxims: ''Take the subscriptions and let the street sales go." . . . ''A mediocre paper with a good circulation department can put out of business the best newspaper in the land with a poor circulation department."

The Senior Cowles plays bridge at the Des Moines Club every day after lunch. He hates poker, likes popcorn, has his wife read to him in the evenings while he plays solitaire.

To Minneapolis. If the Cowles boys were less ambitious they might easily have been content to remain the No. 1 publishers in Iowa for the rest of their lives. Their Register & Tribune has paid dividends for 30 years to its 60 stockholders, almost all of whom are active workers on the newspapers. And their riches would doubtless multiply. But the Brothers Cowles began to have other ideas three years ago when they decided to expand. Sharing their plans was Brother John's good Harvard friend Davis Merwin, who in Bloomington, Ill. was running his family's 99-year-old Pantograph, and running it well enough to make it top-flight among small-town papers. For their first step, Messrs. Cowles & Merwin sought a community with a high rating of literacy and education, a high percentage of native-born U. S. citizens, preferably of northern European stock, an even distribution of purchasing power with few rich, few poor. The paper they wanted was to be an evening sheet with strong reader loyalty and strong emphasis on home circulation. The specifications led them to Minneapolis and the Star.