The Press: Passing of a Giant

In the 42nd Street skyscraper that houses the tabloid New York Daily News, the monster presses were still, resting like exhausted giants from the ordeal of grinding out 4,500,000 fat Sunday newspapers. Upstairs in Ihe city room, a handful of early-trick Newshawks dawdled over Sunday-morning chores. They paused as a telephone buzzed, and stared at the deskman who picked it up. A quiet voice on the wire said, "He died at 10:25."

"He," as every Newsman instantly knew, was restless Joseph Medill Patterson, 67, the maverick journalistic genius who sired the slick, expert, irritating, irreverent, gamy newspaper with the biggest circulation in the U.S.

A month ago a special trainload of 400 staffers, alumni and chums had trooped out to Eagle Bay, Joe Patterson's 108-acre estate overlooking the Hudson at Ossining, N.Y. The party was not like the old days. The grave-eyed host lay in his sickbed upstairs, suffering from the liver disorder that took his life this week. He had never fully recovered from a pneumonia attack that laid him low last November.

Who Succeeds Caesar? Behind him Joe Patterson, moody millionaire and reformed Socialist, left an anxious question for his hirelings and rival press lords to ponder. What would happen to the gaudy Daily News, now that its heart had stopped beating? The answer might rest with two other grandchildren of old Joseph Medill, who founded a fabulous dynasty when he bought into the Chicago Tribune six years before the Civil War.

Cousin Robert Rutherford McCormick, publisher of the Tribune (and co-manager of the Medill Trust),* was certain to move in. And Sister Eleanor Medill ("Cissie") Patterson, shrill publisher of the Washington Times-Herald, would replace Brother Joe as a trustee. Neither has Joe's common touch.

Where or why Patterson got his uncanny touch, he himself never knew. Like Cousin Bertie, he was born (in Chicago, Jan. 6, 1879) with a silver spoon in his mouth. After Groton, like his cousin, he went to Yale. A year before his graduation, he traipsed off to China to run messages for correspondents covering the Boxer Rebellion. His father, Robert W. Patterson, was Joseph Medill's crown prince on the Tribune, and gave young Joe his first $15-a-week job. Impatient with the plodding Tribune and full of admiration for Hearst, he quit in disgust, won a seat in the Illinois legislature, stumped Chicago for a reform candidate for mayor, was rewarded with the job of public works commissioner.

After a valiant but fruitless effort to improve the sweatshop lot of working girls, Patterson went all out for Socialism. In 1906 he got in Dutch with his family by writing a bitter magazine piece called Confessions of a Drone. Excerpt: "I have an income of between $10,000 and $20,000 a year. I spend all of it. I produce nothing—am doing no work. I [the type] can keep on doing this all my life unless the present social system is changed. . . ."

After that outburst, he retired to a farm, spent four years pounding out proletarian novels and three plays. In 1910, his father's death sent him back to the Tribune, by family command, to settle down as an unwilling partner of austere Bertie McCormick.