The Press: Sylvia & You

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Momentum. With Sylvia Porter, "your dollar" comes first. Every column she has written is carefully scrapbooked. Rising about 8:30 in the morning, Sylvia speeds husband and daughter goodbye with a kiss-kiss; by 8:50, sipping coffee in her bedroom and nervously smoking, she is deep in the business section of the Times and all of the Wall Street Journal. ("Here I don't read; I study.") In 20 taut minutes, a mind that can sponge whole columns at a glance has trapped all that Sylvia needs.

As often as lunch is lunch, it is a business interview: "It's hello and right down to it." By 2:30, Sylvia is in her cubbyhole office at the Post (next to that of Gossipist Leonard Lyons). Her back to the filing cabinets full of background material (which she never uses), she whacks away against a 5:30 deadline. Deadline is sometimes missed in the agony of indecision. Last week Sylvia was working ahead in preparation for a planned vacation with Sumner. But even vacations are no particular rest. On a brief winter idyl in the Bahamas, sunning herself near a Detroit executive who did not recognize her, Sylvia picked up a chance remark about an impending Ford stock sale that made front pages all over the U.S.

This kind of momentum is probably what it takes to stay abreast of a business world whose unpredictability and changes Sylvia Porter understands as well as any observer. Her whole philosophy, in fact, is based on momentum. "There are two ways of looking at today's economic society," she says. "One is to preserve what you have. The other is to say, 'This won't do at all.' In recent years, we've only been protecting. You can't have a dynamic society and sit. We are supposed to have a competitive system. We're just paying lip service to it if we start crying tears when it is competitive. Let's be competitive." This is precisely what Business Columnist Sylvia Porter has been doing all her life.