Steel Story

The U. S. Steel Corp. last week had reason to wish that a minister's son named Talcott Williams Powell had never become editor of the Scripps-Howard Indianapolis Times and gone prowling out of his sanctum in search of news stories. Fortnight ago when a general steel strike threatened, 34-year-old Editor Powell led four of his newshawks to Gary, Ind., U. S. Steel's private stronghold in the Midwest. He wanted to observe the exact layout of the steel mills and to chart lines of communication for covering what looked like a major industrial war.

Next day Editor Powell printed in the Times his own story of his inspection tour. He told how he had stopped at the bound ary of U. S. Steel property to make notes and sketches. Excerpts:

". . . Bluecoats scurried from the gates. Three panted up to me. One . . . seized me. I asked him whether I was on company property.

" 'That doesn't make any difference. . . . You're coming to the captain!'

"I asked him whether I were under arrest. He said, 'No, just detained.'

"I told him that if I were not under arrest and not on company property I thought I should be moving along to my cab. This merely caused me to be propelled forcibly to the steel mill's private police station. Once there I was confronted with a roomful of rednecked, large-footed gentry. . . . So again I explained my business, produced identification from the Indianapolis police chief and suggested a number of phone calls--at my expense. The captain himself appeared.

" 'We're going to lock you up for the night, see? Then you won't be making sketches of our gates.'

"I showed him my notes. He seized them, balled them up in his fist, tossed them on the floor. . . . Next came the preliminary to the 'works.' I may say that this consists in shoving the intended victim around with the open hand until he becomes so irritated that he strikes a police officer. . . . I permitted one hearty shove to seat me in a chair.''

Editor Powell managed to despatch his taxi driver to the hotel where one of his staff was staying. Few minutes later "a gentleman with authority" entered U. S. Steel's private police station, refused to identify himself except as "a company official." Said he:

"We'll just call this thing 50-50. You shouldn't have come on company property in this irregular way. . . . You may go."

When Talcott Powell's boss. Scripps-Howard Editor-in-Chief George B. ("Deak") Parker, read his story it fired him with red-hot indignation at U. S. Steel's "corporate gangsterism." He ordered the story sent to all 24 Scripps-Howard papers throughout the land. Last week they spread it across their pages like an indictment.

Men who have worked with Editor Powell know that his encounter with the steel police is the sort of thing he most enjoys. A thoroughgoing, tenacious investigator, he is at bottom a crack newshawk rather than a swivel chair executive. His father is Rev. Lyman Pierson Powell, rector of St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in New York City, onetime president of Hobart University. His godfather was his parents' good friend, the late Talcott Williams, first director of the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University. Son Talcott broke into the newspaper business on the New York Sun, rose to the city desk of the New York Herald Tribune. By that time he had formed a solemn determination to get ahead in the world. Deciding he wanted business office experience, he quit the Tribune, went to Middletown, N. Y. for two years to manage the Times Herald, owned by the E. H. Harriman estate. In 1927 he returned to Manhattan, was promptly hired by Scripps-Howard's Telegram. As an investigator he displayed a talent for exhausting every hidden detail of his subject, became known as an expert on municipal government and banking. His most celebrated job was his expose of irregular features of veterans' relief, which helped win the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for the World-Telegram, and which he later published as a book, Tattered Banners.

Meanwhile, he steadily boosted himself according to plan. He kept a performance chart on himself, graphing his status for the year past and projecting his curve into the future. The curve passed through the position of assistant to Executive Editor Lee Wood of the World-Telegram, led last year to the editorship of the Indianapolis Times (circulation 68,000) the paper on which another ambitious youngster named Roy Howard got his first job writing high school sports 32 years ago. Editor Powell's first act was to rip out the walls dividing the editor from the stuffy city room. Now he finds less and less time to play the accordion or go boating.

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