Shifts

In Chicago, Ill. and Rome, Italy two top-ranking newsmen got ready last week to leave jobs which have brought them fame aplenty and a modicum of fortune.

> Big, brown-haired Louis Ruppel went to the tabloid Chicago Daily Times as managing editor in January 1935, after four years on the New York Daily News, and a brief but exciting term as Deputy Commissioner of Narcotics in the Treasury Department. He found a boisterous, roughhousing staff that would have driven a more timid man to despair, licked it into a fanatically loyal news machine by daily and hourly repetition of his favorite slogan: "Lots of sock!"

Ruppel himself set the pace in the page-one headlines, which he always wrote. A Ruppel classic: "GOODNIGHT MY DARLING" (in white across a full-page cut of William Powell leaving Jean Harlow's funeral).

Last summer rumors got around that Editor Ruppel was unhappy over "changes in routine" which gave other editors added authority in the local room. Two weeks ago he announced he was leaving, was feted at a noisy, sentimental banquet. Times reporters and writers whooped with delight when courtly Musicritic Robert Pollak stood up and described the arrival of Editor Ruppel as a "foundling" in the Times's lobby nearly four years ago. Said he: "The baby was wrapped in an old copy of the New York Daily News. When we first made out its cries it was yelling: 'Come on, you bastards, we'll have to replate'. . . ."

Last week Lou Ruppel got a new job far removed from the din of replating. On December 28 he becomes publicity director of Columbia Broadcasting System.* His successor at the Times: quiet, serious Newseditor Rowland Wood.

> Italy's Minister of Popular Culture, Dino Alfieri, last week ruled that Arnaldo Cortesi, Rome correspondent of the New York Times, must quit his job January 1, along with some 200 other Italian news men employed by foreign newspapers or press associations./-

Correspondent Cortesi might have expected kinder treatment. His father, Salvatore, robust and retired at 69, is one of Italy's greatest journalists, headed the Associated Press Bureau in Rome for 29 years. His own dispatches to the Times have rarely contained anything that could offend the most ardent Fascist.

Managing Editor Edwin Leland James of the Times said this week, "We hope Cortesi will stay with the Times." A lean, cat-eyed, lightly mustached bachelor who understands Americans through his mother (the former Isabelle Lauder Cochrane of Boston), Britishers through his education (he was graduated as an electrical engineer from Birmingham University, worked for a time in the English Westinghouse plant at Manchester), Reporter Cortesi has spent the last 17 of his 41 years covering Italy for the Times, prefers quiet meals at home to dining out in smart places. "His only objections to alcohol," according to a friend, "are those dictated by his kidneys."

*For other news of CBS, see p. 33.

/-According to the London Times, Minister Alfieri's order was probably caused by two recent "leaks" that mightily embarrassed Fascist bigwigs: 1) Several hours before the "spontaneous" shouts of "Tunisia" in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, word got around that they were coming; 2) a recent Italian battleship collision became known abroad two days before it was announced in Italy.

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