Smart Squirt

Starting on a transcontinental tour in a shiny big Cadillac, San Francisco's wonderboy editor, cocky, carrot-topped Paul Clifford ("Pink") Smith of the Chronicle, last week paused to explain why he had refused to run for mayor. With characteristic candor he delivered himself as follows:

"The main reason I'm not running is simply because I've only had a four-year crack at this Chronicle job from topside, and being a fathead I think I need a couple of more years anyhow. The dope is I'm sort of a squirt, a very egotistical one--so egotistical that I think I'm smart enough to know I haven't done the job with a newspaper yet. Maybe I'll wait and run for President.

"Whatever has happened in the past four years has been flashy. I blundered my way into a labor dispute and got it settled. I was called a Communist for six weeks and a Nazi for two minutes. I've done no solid job yet from the newspaper point of view. From the other side there's a job to be done--San Francisco needs a kick in the tail. But I hope to do that with the newspaper."

Forty thousand of his fellow citizens thought Wonderboy Smith could boot old Mayor Angelo Rossi out of his job, and signed a petition asking him to try. A good many others thought he would be easy to beat. Smart Paul Smith had a private poll taken and convinced himself he had a chance. Three hundred and fifty-six people who work for the Chronicle signed another petition begging him to stay on. So the 30-year-old, pint-size, freckle-faced boss of Mark Twain's and Bret Harte's paper decided to stick to his job. One of the funny things about Pinky Smith is that he is dazzled by being a newspaperman.

Saga. A self-styled "little squirt anxious to be a tough guy," Paul Smith skipped through high school in Pescadero, Calif., at 14 set out to rub against the world. He jumped a harvest train, spent some time in the wheat fields of Saskatchewan, rode freight trains east to Ontario for gold, found none, jumped another freight back, worked in British Columbia logging camps (where friendly lumberjacks organized a bodyguard to protect him from those who resented his slickness), prospected in the Mojave Desert (where all he got was sunstroke), shoveled coal in Utah and Pennsylvania, bummed. Once, arriving in Eugene, Ore. with 5-c-, he talked local businessmen into backing a sporting goods store, gave golf lessons to drum up trade. He played in the low 120s. In 1928 he landed a job in a San Francisco bond house; by 1930 he was Anglo California National Bank's resident manager in New York. He was 22 then.

Paul Smith wanted to get into newspaper work, so he went back to San Francisco and began writing a financial column for the Chronicle. Then, deciding he needed more education, he borrowed $500 and went to Europe. In January 1933 the financial editor of the Chronicle died and Wonderboy Smith got a cable to come home and take the job. When Herbert Hoover tried to hire him away in 1935, he was made executive editor. In October 1937 he became general manager, with only one boss, Cementman George Cameron, who married the founder's eldest daughter.

"The Four Seasons," to San Francisco, are the four socialite daughters of horsewhipping Mike De Young, who founded the Chronicle in 1865 and died in 1925.

Joint owners of the paper, their interest in it had been confined to 1) how much money it made, 2) how well it did by their friends in society. Paul Smith talked Publisher George Cameron into giving him a little elbow room and the next thing San Francisco knew the Chronicle had defied a shipowners' and merchants' boycott, front-paged a defiant editorial declaring its independence of The Interests.

But Pinky Smith's real coup was executed in 1938, when in an insulting blob of black type he announced that the Chronicle was fed up with the current warehouse strike, demanded that the warehouse operators and the C. I. O. make peace. The union replied with a suggestion that Editor Smith print the facts or mind his own business. Editor Smith countered with the announcement that "the Chronicle makes it its business to stick its nose into any so-called private row which affects the broad public interest." The union snapped back: "That being the case, we ask you to serve as mediator." Paul Smith did, and settled the strike.

Since then he has been given almost a free hand with the paper and has instituted what he calls a "streamlined Chronicle." Most of its news is departmentalized, lumped under general headings. Onetime Editor Chester Harvey Rowell writes a column on the editorial page that frequently disagrees with the editorial; shy, studious Arthur Eggleston writes his own opinions of labor problems (for which the Chronicle disclaims responsibility); Royce Brier writes a front-page column on foreign affairs; Joseph Henry Jackson conducts the best book column in California. Of San Francisco's four newspapers, the Chronicle is the only one which pays much attention to what goes on outside of California. Typical headline in seven-column blackface:

THE QUESTION OF THE HOUR-CAN DANZIG BE SAVED?

But in spite of Paul Smith's innovations, his brass, and his feverish activity (he will take over any job on the paper, from managing editor to leg man), the morning Chronicle still has the smallest circulation in San Francisco (104,893), carries the largest staff (wags say that at fires there are more Chronicle reporters than firemen). Hearst's Examiner still dominates the morning field with a circulation of 163,003 built on the best local coverage in town. Of the afternoon papers, Hearst's Call-Bulletin is a shrill screamer, the Scripps-Howard News a tired liberal. If Paul Smith can put over the city's only home-owned newspaper as a liberal, world-conscious sheet, he may make a go of it yet.

Nobody has decided yet whether Pinky Smith is a young liberal who happens to be smart or a young smartpants who finds it convenient to appear liberal. But nobody denies that he has gone far in his 30 years and promises to go much farther. Twelve years ago he bummed his way across the toll bridge between Vancouver, Wash, and Portland, told the bridge keeper: "I'll come back some day in my Cadillac and pay you that nickel." Last week he crossed the bridge again and lamented: "Here I am in my Cadillac and I find the bridge is free."

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