ANPA

A man got a telegram from a horse last week. The horse was Bozo, a big rangy hunter in a big box stall looking out over the rolling hills of Tennessee's fertile Harpeth Valley. The man, owner of the horse, was slight, black-haired James Geddes Stahlman, 44, publisher of the Nashville, Tenn. Banner. He was in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan where the 51st annual meeting of the American Newspaper Publishers Association had just elected him its president.

For six years President Stahlman has hunted Bozo with the Hillsboro Hounds. For even longer he has been on his escalator-like way to the presidency of the ANPA. Third Southerner, one of the youngest men to be so chosen, heading a relatively small (72,015 circulation) newspaper, President Stahlman had a sampling at last week's convention of the major problems facing U. S. newspaper publishers: a threatened 1938 newsprint price rise of $7.50 a ton, 25% up in three years; an increasingly difficult taxation situation complicated by Social Security, particularly involving the use of boys to deliver and sell newspapers, and the prairiefire spread of the American Newspaper Guild.

Jim Stahlman's friends back in Nashville who had signed Bozo's name to the telegram of congratulations had wished him luck. "I'll need it," said he. "They should have sent me their sympathy." Jarred to its sacroiliac by the skull-thumping sock of the Supreme Court decision in the Watson v. Associated Press case (TIME, April 19), the spine of U. S. newspaper publishing ached last week.

Labor loomed with a new meaning. At the secret sessions of the Associated Press whose annual meeting overlapped the ANPA's, the AP's perennial President Frank Brett Noyes, publisher of the Washington Star, was quoted as saying, "I have no squawk to make over the decision." Yet nobody doubted that there had been plenty of squawks at the AP's inner council table. Criticism roiled around the handling of the case by AP's counsel, John W. Davis.

Under his guidance the AP had refused to argue the facts in the early stages of the Watson case and merely denied the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board. That some publishers thought Lawyer Davis had blundered was as obvious as a nosebleed when ANPA's general counsel, Elisha Hanson, reminded the ANPA convention that the Watson case had been presented to the Supreme Court "absolutely bare of any facts in the record before the court to disprove the allegation of a violation of the law by the petitioners."

Succeeding Jerome D. Barnum of the Syracuse Post-Standard, Foxhunter Stahlman brings a dynamic, self-confident personality to the ANPA's presidency. He broke a strike which attempted to unionize the Banner's mechanical force seven years ago. Inheritor from his grandfather,* German Immigrant Edward Bushrod Stahlman, of both the Banner and his grandfather's famous quick-temper, Publisher Stahlman sometimes bursts violently out of his office into the city room waving aloft a copy of the Banner and shouting, "Who made this damned mistake?" Operating in a poorly paying newspaper town, he drives himself as hard as he drives his staff, appearing frequently at his office at 5 a. m., having breakfast sent in, working through to suppertime. Prone to establish rigorous routine, he wears black ties year round, blue suits winters, white linen summers. Another personal idiosyncrasy: he hates suspenders, ridicules staffmen who wear them, calls them "sissy." Accustomed to bossing his own business, he champions local causes; alienated the advertising of a Nashville store by exposing its sale of shoddy blankets to flood sufferers; drove loan sharks out of Nashville by publicity last year. While not endorsing Landon, the Banner in last year's election was quite evidently not New Deal.

That he will stick his chin out and let the ANPA, in for labor troubles, those close to Jim Stahlman deny. Routine ANPA work continues under the supervision of well-seasoned Lincoln B. Palmer who has been ANPA's paid manager at New York headquarters for 34 years.

Possibility of the Newspaper Guild's making a special effort to unionize President Stahlman's own paper, as a matter of Guild prestige, paled beside a more immediate home-town newspaper situation.

Refreshed by three years as well-paid president of the Maryland Casualty Co., politically sagacious Silliman Evans, 43, who left the vice-presidency of American Airways in 1932 to run Vice President Garner's Presidential boom and then rode the Roosevelt bandwagon into the Fourth Assistant Postmaster Generalcy, last fortnight announced himself as the new publisher of the Nashville Tennessean whose evening and Sunday editions compete with the Banner. Behind capable Publisher Evans' roly-poly person loomed the paternal bulk of huge Jesse Jones and the RFC (TIME, Oct. 21, 1935, et seq.) whose interest in the Tennessean seemed to guarantee the New Deal a strengthened friend in Nashville and the Banner a strengthened rival.

*Stahlman's father died when he was a boy; his grandfather raised him.

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