The Press: The Fair Lady of Milwaukee

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What Contract? In the Nieman tradition, Grant runs the Journal on a simple principle: "You've got to have good editorial matter for a paper to get circulation, and you've got to have circulation to get advertising. Editorial matter is the base of it all." Journal advertisers learned early a primary rule of U.S. journalism: the more successful a paper, the less susceptible it is to influence from advertisers. Harry Grant taught the lesson to Milwaukee in a typically forthright manner. When an advertiser asked for special treatment in the news columns because of "my $50,000 ad contract," Grant asked him: "What contract?" "Why, the contract I have with you," answered the advertiser. "You mean the contract you had with the Journal" answered Grant.

To keep free from ties and commitments that might jeopardize the paper's independence, Grant and his staff take little direct part in Milwaukee public life. "I have something everybody else in Milwaukee wants," explains Grant. "They want to use the Journal through me. They'll do the damnedest tricks—throw dinner parties, ply you with liquor, find pretexts to get on your blind side. We're not out to make friends. We stick by principles instead of to individuals."

The Five. When he is in Milwaukee Grant leaves his twelve-room, lakeview apartment on Milwaukee's fashionable Prospect Avenue (he owns the nine-story apartment house) every morning at 9:30. By 10, he is in his richly decorated office in the Journal's five-story building on Fourth and State Street. In meetings with his high command. Grant is as voluble as a Salvation Army brigadier at a mission meeting, acting out each part in the drama he creates. Once, in the middle of such a speech. Grant stopped, then bellowed: "I talk too goddamn much. Kick me in the tail and get me out of here." He seldom sees a piece of copy before it is printed, keeps apart from the staff, rarely making an appearance in the Journal's city room. Some reporters with years of service have never met him.

The staff is nominally responsible to Editor and President J. (for John) Donald Ferguson, 63, a friendly, Missouri-born, white-thatched newsman, who, like Grant and the Journal's managing editor, started out as a railway worker. Like every other staffer, he always calls Grant "Mr. Grant." (Once he addressed him as "Boss," and Grant exploded: "That reminds me of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Simon Legree.") Editor Ferguson leaves the day-to-day operations to Managing Editor Wallace ("Chink") Lomoe, 56, a capable, hard-driving ex-state editor who came to the Journal as a reporter 25 years ago, is president of the Associated Press Managing Editors' Association. Chief Editorial Writer Lindsay Hoben, 51, who joined the paper in 1925, runs the five-man staff of editorial writers. Publisher Irwin Maier, 54, devotes his time to keeping the balance sheet healthy, and Business Manager Donald B. (for Byron) Abert, 46, who ably runs the plant operations, good-naturedly admits that marrying Grant's only child, Barbara, has helped his climb. Says Grant "Some men get s.o.b.s for sons-in-law. I'm lucky.

I got a hard-working son-in-law."