The Press: Ep Hoyt & the Hussy

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No Newspaperman? He had revitalized one paper before. A Baptist minister's son, he spent 18 months in France with the A.E.F., worked his way through the University of Oregon's Journalism School (whose dean told him he would never make a newspaperman). Married while still in college, Ep Hoyt did janitor work in churches, sports correspondence for the Oregonian, spent summer vacations lum-berjacking in eastern Oregon.

In 1926, landing on the Oregonian for his second copydesk stretch, he got $45 a week, wrote Westerns for the pulp market on the side. After twelve years he was publisher, already deep in the job of restyling the stodgy Oregonian, pepping it up for a successful circulation battle with the Oregon Journal.

He insisted on divorcing news from opinion, a major operation for a paper steeped in the personal-journalism tradition of the Oregonian's founder, Henry L. Pittock, a goat-bearded tyrant of pioneer days. Under Hoyt the Republican Oregonian gave labor, Democrats, Japanese-Americans an even break — something the Denver Post never did.

A tireless joiner, public speaker and partygoer, Palmer Hoyt gets around like no other Oregonian. He drinks his whiskey and gobbles his vitamin pills with equal gusto. His appetite for civic wheelhorsing has never been sated. He helped bring Henry Kaiser to Portland. As Oregon's first War Bond director, he put the state at the head of the U.S. in sales. His methods became the pattern for the national bond drives. In 1943 Hoyt slaved for six months as OWI's domestic director, fought hard to keep war news flowing free from needless and petty censorship.

Last week in Denver, Postmen held their breaths. Their paper-with-a-past might have a future after all.