Candidate's Paper

Sober, solid, and imposing as the Tafts who own it is the Cincinnati Times-Star. Like the Tafts. it is a bulwark of the G. O. P.

Last week the Times-Star celebrated its 100th anniversary with a 318-page centennial issue. In an unwonted display of high animal spirits, the staff set off 100 small bombs as a five-pound birthday edition rolled off the presses. A man in a top hat, driving a one-horse shay, went out to distribute copies. The mammoth issue sold for 3-c-, went to some 300,000 readers: double the normal circulation (153,240) of the Times-Star.

Charles Phelps Taft, half-brother of the late William Howard Taft, bought the Times in 1879, and merged it next year with the Cincinnati Star. When he died in 1929, he left the Times-Star to his family. To each of his daughters, Mrs. Anna Louise Taft Semple and Mrs. Jane Taft Ingalls, went 40% of the stock. Hulbert Taft, his nephew, got 10%. Nephews Bob Taft, now candidate for President, and Charles Phelps Taft, a Cincinnati city councilman, each inherited 5%.

The Tafts got together, decided to let Hulbert Taft manage his uncle's paper. Hulbert has run it ever since. Senator Bob, Councilman Charlie rarely interfere with Hulbert's policies.

Hulbert Taft, 62, educated (like Bob and Charlie) at Yale, is a kindly, tall, wizened man whose chief interests, aside from his paper, are horses and music. He uses endless columns in the Times-Star to promote better music for art-loving Cincinnati. His attitude toward employes is friendly, paternalistic. The Times-Star avoids an American Newspaper Guild contract by the simple device of paying better salaries, granting longer vacations than its rival, the Post.

The Times-Star is prosperous, owns its handsome, 16-story plant, which cost the Tafts $1,300,000 (plus $600,000 for new equipment) in 1930. In Cincinnati the Times-Star keeps a jump ahead of the Post and the morning Enquirer. But its field is virtually limited to Cincinnati. In Kentucky, across the Ohio River, the Times-Star (like the Post and Enquirer) publishes a Kentucky edition which is wrapped around the Cincinnati edition. But northern Kentucky is a Democratic bailiwick. There the Times-Star's circulation is only about 18,000, compared to the Democratic Post's 35,000.

For last week's anniversary issue Sports Editor Nixson Denton wrote a full-page tribute to the Times-Star management from their employes. Said he: "We are proud to be an integral part, however small or large, of an institution . . . where there is noblesse oblige on the part of the master and fealty on the part of the man. Feudal the Times-Star may be, but its feudalism needs no apologist. . . . Without humility, we are grateful for the fine conditions that surround us. . . ."

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