The Press: The Sun's Orbit

On any other paper the news would probably have rated Page One. But the Baltimore Sun is not any other paper: it is the Baltimore Sun. Consequently, the word was passed to Sun readers last week in a dignified "Announcement" on the editorial page: "After nine years as president of the A. S. Abell Company and 50 years of association with the Sunpapers, Mr. William F. Schmick Sr. has offered his resignation to the board of directors and asked to be retired. Mr. William F.

Schmick Jr., who has served as executive vice president since 1953, has been chosen to succeed his father as president." So saying, the Sun dropped the subject, confident that Baltimoreans, accustomed to the unhurried. 123-year continuum of their favorite newspaper, would accept the change in command without losing any sleep. Baltimoreans did.

The fact is that in Baltimore, Schmicks may come and Schmicks may go, but the Sun abides like the oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Residents set such store by the Sun-papers that they accept the Sun's word as though coming from above, follow its paternal advice in running the city, and generally vote just the way the Sun tells them to, or, like disobedient children, just the opposite way.

No Mingling. Beamed strictly at Baltimore, the morning Sun (circ. 198,204) and the evening Sun (circ. 216,261) nonetheless orbit the world: the Szwpapers have one of the largest newspaper bureaus in Washington (ten men), keep staffers in London, Moscow, Rome and Bonn, and often, rather than rely on wire-service copy, send their own men after the big national news, wherever it breaks. The only time the morning Sun ever bought a syndicated political columnist, it killed his copy and thereby kept it out of town for years; the columnist was Drew Pearson, whom the Sun had fired in 1932. The evening Sun, established 50 years ago, is separated from the older morning Sun by an editorial rivalry so intense that the two staffs never collaborate on duty.

The Sun was founded in 1837 by an itinerant printer with the resounding name of Arunah Shepherdson Abell.

Against entrenched competition—six daily, nine weekly and two monthly papers —Abell prospered by offering the only penny paper in the field, and by a stubborn insistence on telling the truth in an era when most newspapers were for hire.

No Soliciting. While Abell lived, no Sun reporter ever got a byline, no advertisement was ever solicited—merchants had to walk in with the copy and the cash.

Abell was willing to catalogue municipal flaws ("Anybody in want of a dead pig can find one in Calvert Street"), but he largely ignored politicians as low types ranking somewhat beneath Baltimore's criminal element.

Abell dreamed of a time when Baltimore would be the nation's biggest seaport and the Sun the most famous paper in the U.S. Baltimore never made it, but long after Abell's death in 1888, it seemed for a while that the Sun might actually achieve his dream: in the halcyon days of Henry Louis Mencken and Frank R. Kent, for years the dean of U.S. political columnists, the name of the Sun was second to none.