Old Lady

"Although it may be depriving its readers of a bit of information which they have been accustomed to find in the press, the Courant is now omitting to mention in its obituary columns the nature of the disease or ailment to which death was attributable. . . . If we can make through the policy here announced a small contribution to the peace of mind of those who foster gloomy predictions we shall be well satisfied. . . ."

This unique journalistic backward step was news last week because it was taken by the 175-year-old Hartford Courant, which has the longest continuous publishing history of any paper in the U. S. The Courant has not missed an issue since Thomas Green pulled its first from a hand press on October 29, 1764. It printed the Declaration of Independence as news, numbered George Washington among the subscribers who read the lively, eye-witness war correspondence of Israel Putnam. Republican since the Connecticut branch of the party was founded in its editorial rooms by Publisher Joseph R. Hawley, who was the first man in his State to enlist in the Civil War, and who returned a brigadier general, the Courant opposed women's suffrage and the direct election of Senators as steadfastly as it now opposes Franklin Roosevelt.

The Courant is still published within a stone's throw of Founder Green's hand press. It is now ruled in its obituary policy and otherwise by sober, stamp-collecting Publisher Henry H. Conland, who joined the paper as an office boy 39 years ago, and Editor Maurice S. Sherman, a good-natured fisherman whose editorial style is compared with that of the Courant's most famed leader writer, Mark Twain's crony, Charles Dudley Warner. Together they have helped restore respectability to the "Old Lady of State Street," who lost it briefly after the World War in a red-&-yellow whirl under the editorship of Emile Gauvreau, later editor of Bernarr Macfadden's late New York Graphic. The Courant readers (44.000 daily, 67,000 Sunday) get for their 4-c- no big headlines but plenty of features, local titbits, hobby news. Today the Old Lady is reaping the reward of her most impressive campaign, a consistent fight on Prohibition. Hard pressed by Frank Gannett's Evening Times, which refuses liquor advertising, the Courant enjoys about $50,000 worth a year.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.