In Tennessee

Three years ago Tennessee's most potent publisher was big, dynamic Colonel Luke Lea, an A. E. F. artillery officer and onetime Senator. Today he is a man stripped and broken by adversity, desperately fighting extradition to North Carolina where a six-to-ten year prison sentence for bank fraud awaits him. With his crony, Banker-Promoter Rogers Clark Caldwell, Col. Lea was strong in State politics. With his able son Luke Jr. who is also fighting extradition and a heavy fine, he ran the Nashville Tennesseeans (morning & evening), the Knoxville Journal, the Memphis Commercial Appeal and Evening Appeal. Since 1930, when the financial dream-empire of Promoter Caldwell crashed into ruin and scandal, Col. Lea has lost all his newspapers. Last week the onetime publisher made a first move to get back into his old field by announcing plans for a new paper, the Nashville Free Press His wife & son were to be the incorporators.

Also last week another brace of Luke Lea papers made news when the Memphis Appeals were bought from the receivers by James Thomas Hammond Jr., publisher of Hearst's Detroit Times. The stolid, conservative Commercial Appeal (''Largest Circulation in the South"--111,000), is so deeply rooted in affairs of the South that even the Lea-Caldwell cataclysm failed to shake it. Good-looking Publisher Hammond, 40, was back on home soil. He had been brought up in Tennessee, got to be a bank vice president in Arkansas whence he was hired in 1922 by Lord & Taylor. Manhattan department store, as its treasurer. Five years later he became president of Gimbel Bros, store in Pittsburgh, there stumbled through a back door to the publishing business when William Randolph Hearst bought the store's radio broadcasting station for $900,000. In course of the negotiations Mr. Hearst hired Mr. Hammond.

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