In Kansas City

When it was announced last week that the Kansas City Star and its morning edition, the Times, had been sold to a syndicate representing the present editors and managers a flood of congratulatory telegrams poured in. The Star had come into the market upon the death of the daughter of its late owner, Colonel William Rockhill Nelson, and friends of the newspaper waited in trepidation for the announcement of the buyer. Among those who expressed their satisfaction that the Star was to remain with the men who had made it were governors, cabinet members, editors, ambassadors, politicians, for the Star long ago became a power in the land. But perhaps the most significant telegram was one from Chicago:

"Many congratulations to the Star. With sympathetic understanding of your feelings." It came from Walter A. Strong, general manager of the Chicago Daily News whose late owner, Victor F. Lawson, left the paper to be sold that the proceeds might be given to Congregational Church works (TIME, Jan. 4). Mr. Strong and his associates have good reason to sustain sympathetic understanding of the feelings of men who stood recently in danger of being deprived of all interest in an enterprise to which they had given the best energies of their lives, or else of being, in Arthur Brisbane's phrase, "sold with the plantation." For Colonel Nelson, was only one of three publishers of important newspapers to evince in his will that he did not care a fiddlestick what became of his newspaper after he had gone. "To be sold." Frank Munsey and Victor Lawson used the same phrase.

Colonel Nelson was an able and conscientious editor. His paper was a paper of "ideals"--none more so. His habit of printing a great deal of miscellaneous but accurate information about science, invention, exploration, literature, made the Star a sort of university extension for boys and girls on Kansas and Missouri farms. Nothing that he could do, while he lived, to make it a better paper, was left undone. The Star repaid his efforts with about $20,000,000. "He shared with Frank Munsey" commented the New Republic "the extraordinary respect for art which is sometimes found among those who know nothing whatever about it." The $11,000,000 realized by the sale of the paper is all to be used to buy art works for Kansas City. It is perhaps fortunate that the men who are paying it--Irwin Kirkwood, present editor and son-in-law of Mr. Nelson, in cooperation with the managing editor, the general manager, and the chief editorial writer--have a profound respect for a business they know a good deal about, the business of running a newspaper.