Boiler-Plate Maker

Wright Arthur Patterson is editor in chief of Western Newspaper Union, which supplies "boiler plate" (stereotyped feature columns) and "readyprint" feature pages to rural newspapers. The nation does not stir at mention of his name, but he has some 12,000 country editors as clients (of whom about 4,000 consider Pat Patterson their personal friend), and through their papers he has a total circulation of more than 30,000,000. Last week, in Chicago, 100 of his 4,000 friends gave Editor Patterson a dinner to celebrate his 50 years with W.N.U.

A merger of three small-town newspaper services. W.N.U. is the oldest, biggest syndicate in the U. S., with more clients than all other syndicates combined. Now an $8,300,000 corporation, it began with eight customers in 1865 as the A. N. Kellogg Newspaper Co. Pat Patterson,* Missouri-born, son of an itinerant Methodist minister, turned up in Chicago, aged 19, and landed a job at $10 a week reading and clipping papers for Kellogg. For ten years Patterson turned out twelve columns a week on travel, household hints, agricultural news, women's fashions.

W.N.U. now has 34 plants, scattered from Manhattan to San Francisco, Minneapolis to Dallas. For its 3,000 ready-print customers, W.N.U. prints either four or six pages, with or without advertising, ships them to the country press, where local news and editorials are added. Available for rural clients are news analyses, a Washington letter, cartoons, war pictures, Bible lessons, comic strips, genteel fiction.

Pat Patterson at 69 still goes to his office each morning at 9:30. At noon he usually wanders over to the Adventurers' Club (his qualifications for membership: 36 summers spent fishing in Canadian woods) to idle away the afternoons swapping yarns with a drink at his elbow. Mild-mannered, spry, Pat chews an unlighted cigar while he talks in a voice so low that it frequently dies away to a mumble.

Pat Patterson had expected to retire last week on his 50th anniversary at W.N.U. but changed his mind. Although he dislikes Franklin Roosevelt so much that he stayed away from the Democratic convention in 1936 (the first convention he had missed since McKinley was nominated in 1896), this year he wants to stay to cover the Republican and maybe the Democratic conventions. Then in November he will go to California, and retire.

The place he has picked for his retirement is a desk--but no job--in the office of the Orange (pop. 8,066) News, 35 miles from Los Angeles. For he thinks the rural press is the backbone of the U. S.

* No kin to Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News, Sister Eleanor Medill ("Cissie") Patterson, publisher of the Washington Times-Herald.

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