The Press: After the Colonel

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When Chicago Tribune Publisher Robert R. McCormick died last spring, newsmen all over the U.S. wondered what changes would come in the paper without the Colonel's commanding, eccentric personality to steer it. Would the Trib, for example, drop some of his pet projects and peeves? Last week, amidst a number of almost imperceptible changes, the Trib stepped right out and put the ax to one of the Colonel's fondest innovations.

For the first time since the day in 1934 when McCormick ordered radical new simplified spelling, the Trib was going back to some old spelling rules. Instead of such words as frate, grafic, tarif, soder and sofisticated, the Trib will now use freight, graphic, tarif, solder and sophisticated, just like everybody else. Still unchanged are the Colonel's spellings of such words as thoro, burocratic and altho.

While he was alive, the Colonel stuck to his simplified spelling with a vengeance. When his own orthographer and key men on the Tribune staff objected to frater, McCormick splashed on their memo one red-ink sentence: "We will keep frater because the Tribune likes it." But now that the Colonel is no longer the Tribune, it is developing new likes and dislikes. "It's largely due to public relations," explains one old staffer. "We are eliminating a feeling of irritation." There is, adds another Trib staffer, "a sort of indescribable feeling of mildness about the place now."

Although the Trib still hews to its maverick politics, blasting both the Democrats and the Republicans and taking off after many of its old whipping boys, its running battle with the 20th century in general has started to subside. There is also more humor and less soapboxing on the editorial page. Says Managing Editor Don Maxwell, editorial boss of the triumvirate that now runs the paper (TIME, April 18), "I always hate to do anything that changes a policy of the Colonel's, but I have to make up my own mind now."

What made up Maxwell's mind on simplified spelling was that Chicagoland schoolteachers complained that they were having trouble teaching students to spell words right when the Trib persisted in spelling them wrong. While most newsmen applauded the efforts of the new Trib's bosses to strike out on their own, the applause was tempered by some regret. Said one Chicago newsman: "There is something sad about seeing the Trib lose the old to-hell-with-everything air of individualism that the Colonel instilled."