Washington Anniversary

No U. S. city of 500,000 population except Washington, D. C. has five daily newspapers. Result has been that only one-- Frank Brett Noyes's stodgy Star--has made money; seldom have they achieved any particular journalistic distinction. Five years ago among the least distinguished was the Post. When former Federal Reserve Board Governor and RFC Chairman Eugene Meyer bought the rundown property in 1933 for $825,000, few thought that a banker, entering the publishing business at the age of 57, would make newspaper history.

But Eugene Meyer has a fortune conservatively estimated, at $30,000,000 and a capacity for surrounding himself with able men. From The Brookings Institution, he hired an editor, Felix Morley (brother of Christopher), who soon won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. To give the paper zip, he hired a Middle-Westerner as managing editor, Alexander F. ("Casey") Jones. The Post soon developed a set of features good enough to be syndicated. Brightest among them are the arresting cartoons of 28-year-old Gene Elderman.

In five years, the Post doubled its circulation (now 112,000), more than doubled its advertising lineage. By last year, its $1,000,000 annual losses had been reduced to $400,000. But Publisher Meyer was having too good a time with his newspaper to be fazed by such deficits. Last week, he celebrated the anniversary of his entry into the Fourth Estate by announcing the acquisition of the foreign news service and 14 features from the New York Herald Tribune, including Walter Lippmann, Dorothy Thompson, Mark Sullivan, Book Reviewer Lewis Garnett, Drama Critic Richard Watts Jr., Sports Columnist Richards Vidmer and the impeccable Lucius Beebe, to whom Washington dress is "a little like country folks in sports clothes."

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