Tramp's New Chief

Earle Martin went rummaging last week for his old alpaca coat and soiled straw hat. On & off for 25 years they were part of his uniform as a newspaper editor. The coat was comfortable. Tho hat, worn winter & summer (with occasional changes for a battered felt), kept pressroom grime from the editor's bald pate. Now, after four years of blue serge and spotless linen as a Chamber of Commerce executive, he would need his old accoutrements again. He had just been hired as editor of the Cleveland News.

The Evening News, creation of the late great President-Maker Marcus Alonzo ("Mark") Hanna, was until recently wholly owned by his grandsons Daniel, Carl & Mark. Two months ago it was merged with the politely Democratic Plain

Dealer (morning). The merger was purely financial. The News is still published in its own premises, a plant so fine that the yellowish News has been called "the tramp that lives in a palace."

There is nothing tramplike about the News's new editor who was once reputed "the ablest journalist between Chicago and Manhattan." He is gentle, somewhat naive, with a professorial mannerism of peering over the tops of spectacles which are always slipping down his nose. Born 58 years ago in Indiana, son of a college president, Earle Martin began early to prepare himself for the newspaper business. While yet in school he wrote Author David Graham Phillips whom his mother used to tutor in Greek, asking what he should do about it. Author Phillips prescribed a college education, voracious reading, knowledge and use of simple words, unaffectedness of mind and manner. Editor Martin followed all this advice to the letter.

He worked his way through his father's college (Moores Hill) by corresponding for the Indianapolis News, of which another Indianan, Meredith Nicholson, was editor. There, after college, he got his first regular job. In 1896 he joined the Scripps Cincinnati Post as a cub police reporter. Three years later he was managing editor. Excepting a five-year interlude in Indianapolis, Editor Martin's career for the next 25 years was in the old Scripps and young Scripps-Howard organizations. He edited the Cleveland Press, became editorial chief of all Scripps-papers in Ohio, headed Scripps-Howard's NEA feature service, organized and edited the News in Washington, returned to the Cleveland Press.

In 1926 he left Scripps-Howard to edit the four-year-old Cleveland Times which momentarily challenged the Plain-Dealer's monopoly in the morning field. For lack of advertising the Times withered within a year, having been nothing more potent than an honest, genteel, ingenuous paper. Editor Martin became industrial commissioner of the Chamber of Commerce.

Like most seasoned newspaper editors Earle Martin is addressed by all who ever worked for him as "Chief." Unlike most, he says: "I came out of newspaper work with a high regard for the intelligence of the general public."

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