Death of Wiley

The black-robed rabbi glanced down at the casket covered with spring flowers. Facing him in the pews were nearly 2,000 men & women, great and small. Owen D. Young was there and so were Brigadier-General Cornelius Vanderbilt, Myron C. Taylor. Mrs. Vincent Astor, Henry Morgenthau Sr., Lucrezia Bori, many & many another. As the organ's whisper floated away, the rabbi said:

". . . In Louis Wiley power was conjoined with goodness, masterfulness of intellect with kindliness of heart. This man had it within him not only to do with all his might whatever his hands found to do, but he was wont to perform his daily labors with the same grace and joyousness as a mother serves her beloved child. It was because of his rare gifts and disposition that Louis Wiley was able to overcome handicaps. . . . With such a nature, it was inevitable that he should regard the Press as a social agency and not as a personal vehicle."

Among the 2,000 who reverently followed the remains of Louis Wiley out of Manhattan's Temple Emanu-El last week, few felt the rabbi's eulogy was unduly exaggerated. For Louis Wiley, the undersized, dynamic and somewhat pompous business manager of the New York Times, was not only an extraordinary newspaperman but one of the kindliest individuals his profession ever produced.

The title of business manager did small justice to Louis Wiley's journalistic functions. No mere countingroom man, he was Publisher Adolph Ochs's confidant, adviser, ambassador, and on occasion, alter ego. Just short of 40 years ago he first approached Mr. Ochs, who had bought the moribund Times, persuaded the publisher to hire him at $40 a week. He was then 26, and had pulled himself up from $6-a-week reporter to business manager of the Rochester Post-Express. He had much to do with the Times's prosperity and with its rigidly high standards of advertising. He was a stickler for efficiency, a pocket-sized dynamo of energy. As many as 18 hours a day he might sit at his desk, his dwarfed body perched on a high cushion, his feet touching a tall hassock beneath the desk. A half dozen visitors or subordinates usually sat in chairs around the walls, waiting their turn to talk with Mr. Wiley. He was quietly, courteously brisk. While listening intently to an underling he might sign letters, scribble instructions.

But it was outside the Times office that Louis Wiley shone. He was everywhere. At civic and social functions he was the Times. He represented the institution ably, and he loved it. He was a mainstay of the New York Advertising Club, never seemed to weary of speaking at luncheon clubs and banquets. Did the students of Hobart College, or the Advertisers' Club of Davenport, Iowa, or the International Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers, or the inmates of Welfare Island prison want Mr. Wiley to talk to them? Mr. Wiley would talk. Publicity loving, he had copies of his speeches sent to all the Press. He often went abroad, made many a speech, hobnobbed with many a bigwig, interviewed royalty, had private audience with the Pope. He had six honorary degrees--no fewer than Mr. Ochs. Mr. Ochs has only one foreign decoration (the Legion of Honor); Louis Wiley had eleven.

Wherever Louis Wiley went he made acquaintances by the score, friends by the dozen. He was passionately proud of his acquaintance with celebrities. Whoever saw him once, never forgot him. His ingratiating personality made a sharp first impression; his compelling personality made the impression permanent. Like many a self-made man, he paid his underlings meagrely, but his private philanthropies were supposed to be prodigious.

Louis Wiley never married. He lived in quiet luxury in a huge Park Avenue apartment, attended by men servants. He got his greatest fun out of dancing. Asked what, aside from the Times he liked best, he once replied: "Beautiful and attractive young women."

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