The Press: Magnificent Obsession

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As the roll call on the Alaska statehood bill began on the floor of the U.S. Senate last week (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), a shy, round-faced man in the press gallery hurriedly placed a long-distance call. His party was 3,300 miles away: the daily News-Miner in Fairbanks, Alaska. In his flat monotone, Publisher Charles Willis ("Bill") Snedden pridefully described his tory in the making to Managing Editor George Sundborg.

"I told George the instant it passed," said Snedden later, "but damn it, he winked or signaled to someone, and the word got out to the newsroom and the streets. Sirens started blowing, horns honking, people shrieking and yelling. It cost me 20 minutes in long-distance time just waiting and fiddling with my hearing aid until things quieted down enough for me to give George the details for the special edition. It was probably the happiest money I've ever wasted in my life."

Delivery by B-47. In Fairbanks, Managing Editor Sundborg got Snedden 's story on the presses, whirled out the last pages of a special four-color, 40-page issue. He hustled 2,000 copies to nearby Ladd Air Force Base, where a B-47 was about to take off for Washington. By lunch time next day, every Congressman and Senator had a copy of Snedden's News-Miner headlined: CONGRESS APPROVES ALASKA STATEHOOD.

For 44-year-old Publisher Snedden, any less dramatic performance would have been an anticlimax to his arduous, four-year campaign to get Alaska into the Union. Not even Governor Mike Stepovich (TIME, June 9) worked harder. Every fall he put out a special 144-page, four-color issue on the glories of Alaska, sent a copy to every member of Congress and to the editor of every U.S. paper with more than 50,000 circulation.

This year, smelling victory, Snedden spent five months in Washington working hand in glove with Fred Seaton, Secretary of the Interior, and himself boss of a string of eight daily newspapers in Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming and South Dakota. Snedden paced the Senate and House office buildings, flipping through 3-by-5 cards printed with summaries of legislators' stands on the bill, fed data to pro-Alaska Senators, whipped up answers to every possible objection to statehood. His influence was everywhere. When Washington's Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson momentarily flagged in his zeal for statehood, he was spurred on by eight Washington editors who had been spurred on by Snedden. "You start off with something as a hobby," says Snedden. "Pretty soon it's an avocation. And then it's an obsession."

Eye on the Future. Staunch Republican Snedden did not always have his magnificent obsession. Growing up in the Northwest, he learned the backshop trades of the news business, mastered the Linotype when he was 14, developed into a skilled doctor of slumping papers, and, incidentally, made a pile in real estate. When he went up to Fairbanks in 1950 to diagnose what ailed the sick News-Miner of Austin ("Cap") Lathrop, Snedden was convinced that Alaska should not seek statehood.