The Press: Bureaucrat's Laugh

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Owlish Elmer Davis last week let out a Hoosier hoot at Editor & Publisher, for reporting that OWI might sell its Overseas Branch to a newspaper after the war. In a 1,000-word letter to the editor, Davis wrote: "When the war is over we liquidate ourselves. [Besides] what could a publisher buy? ... It is the tradition of the newspaper business that the slaves go with the plantation. But in this case you can't sell the plantation and they wouldn't go with it anyway. . . . Thanks for enabling me to punctuate the grey and gloomy routine of a bureaucrat with a loud laugh.

"I can think of better ones—for instance, that the Navy will be sold, after the war, to the Hudson River Day Line; battleships to be used on the Albany run and carriers for excursions to Coney Island, with dancing on the flight decks."