The Press: Sylvia & You

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"Is it obstinacy, stupidity or sheer ill advice?" she cried in the American Banker, a normally undisputatious periodical that also ran her articles. "What is behind the actions of this Secretary who, every summer, seems to lapse into disharmony with the Government bond market?" When Morgenthau demanded to meet the author of these impudent words, the Banker was understandably reluctant to present him with a female financial writer hardly out of her teens. The journal politely refused, in a letter that offered no clue as to her gender. Morgenthau found out anyway, dropped the matter—and eventually turned into a Sylvia Porter fan.

Unveiling a Woman. On other such coups, notably a Scribner's Magazine article that goaded the U.S. Treasury Department into breaking up a Government-bond racket that S. F. Porter exposed, Sylvia showed such flair that the Post ultimately decided her sex had become an asset. "I believe very definitely that the time has come for us to make capital of the fact that S. F. Porter is a woman," wrote T. O. Thackrey, then editor of the Post, in a 1942 memo to the staff. The public unveiling—a full byline accompanied by a winsome half-column photograph—brought an odd sort of celebrity: one longtime column correspondent moodily addressed his next letter to "Darling" instead of "Dear Mr. Porter." From the U.S. Senate floor, in 1942, Colorado's Edwin Johnson branded her "the biggest liar in the United States" after a rash of Porter attacks on his silver policy. As the only lady business columnist in harness, she was in steady vogue as a lecturer. "After all, our second choice," wrote the executive secretary of the Massachusetts Bankers Association to Sylvia's lecture agency, "would not have the allure and woo-woo of Miss Porter."

Success has only accelerated the drive of a driven woman to stay where fate—with a considerable assist from Sylvia Porter—has landed her. In 1944, with some help from her second husband, Sumner Collins, whom she had married the year before, she started a weekly newsletter on Government bonds. Called Reporting on Governments, it circulates (at $60 a year) to a blue-chip clientele of 2,500 bankers, economists and securities dealers, who consider it must reading. In recent years she has had effective assistance in this from Joseph Slevin, who also writes finance from Washington for the New York Herald Tribune.

The militant crusader of 22 has vanished in the resounding success of 47. Anxious to lose none of her enormous—and enormously variegated—syndication,

Columnist Porter maintains a political neutrality so absolute that few of her readers realize she was a fervent Kennedy fan. She hustles unashamedly for more papers. On one visit to Dallas, she went up to Times Herald Executive Editor Felix McKnight, tore a dollar bill in two and gave him half. Recalls McKnight: "She said to me, 'I'll give you the other half when you take my column.' And she did, too."