The Press: Odds & Ends: Aug. 31, 1931

The Dayton (Ohio) Daily News is owned by James Middleton Cox, three-time Governor of the State, onetime (1920) Democratic candidate for the Presidency. Last week Mr. Cox's Daily News announced an experiment, charitable, interer—making, reader-getting. The paper had Discovered that in the nearby Miami valley "there are thousands of bushels of wheat selling at such a low price that a great deal of it will be fed to farm animals this winter ... a plenitude of supplies, and yet want involving more families than have ever gone hungry in the history of this country." The Daily News said it would buy some of this wheat, give it to needy folk endorsed by the Dayton Family Welfare Association. If the family had a coffee grinder it could make whole wheat muffins, cakes .or breads, or else soak the wheat for 48 hours and make porridge. The Daily News hoped: "If this method can be demonstrated, then it may spread all over the country."

¶ Writers on the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune used to chalk up on a blackboard each silly question that one staff member asked another. High man for the week was supposed to stand his contemporaries a drink or drinks. No living man ever scored highest, however.

High score for silly talk was always given to the late great Stephen Decatur, whose Our-Country-Right-Or-Wrong speech runs in the Tribune's massed-head as its slogan. When Col. Robert Rutherford McCormick, publisher of the Tribune, made his annual inspection visit, someone was told off to stand in front of the score board. Last week Publisher McCormick, inspecting his Paris branch, had other things to think of beside blackboards. He learned that his European paper had been wizened to its winter size (eight and twelve pages) all summer, that the competing U.S. daily, the Paris Herald, had been light too but was distributing 34,000 net paid copies to the Tribune's padded 14,000. Publisher McCormick was reported planning a shakeup.

¶ After 91 years in business, last week the London Sunday News collapsed. Although it had a circulation of 1,000,000, the paper's fate had been sealed since the disappearance of its associated journal, the Daily Chronicle, a year ago. David Lloyd George was once financially interested in the Sunday News. Six months ago prolific Author-Playwright Edgar Wallace acquired control, wrote theatrical criticism in it, gave horse-race tips, scattered his name and the name of his multifarious works throughout the paper. The Sunday News will be incorporated with the Sunday Graphic, a tabloid picture paper.

¶ Founded in 1889 by Drygoodsman John Wanamaker, bought and made into one of the first great crusading journals 17 years later by Butterick Publishing Co., discontinued in January 1930, last week Everybody's was revived as a cheap true-story vehicle. It will be published as "the magazine of real life stories" by Publisher Alfred Cohen (Screenland, Silver Screen, etc.). Cost: 10¢.