Grandma Married

In Montgomery, Ala., the 112-year-old morning Advertiser last week took over its 52-year-old afternoon competitor, the Alabama Journal, celebrated by bringing out a joint Sunday edition. No run-of-the-mill newspaper union was this. The venerable Advertiser, known to most Montgomeryites as Grandma, is the most potent editorial voice between Atlanta and New Orleans. It cost the Advertiser's Publisher Richard Furman Hudson over $350,000 to buy out the Journal last week, made the combined papers a $1,000,000 property.

One good reason for the Advertiser's potency is its editor: farm-born, foppish Grover Cleveland Hall, who ranks with Louisville's Herbert Agar, Richmond's Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman, as an editorial influence in the South. When former Governor James M. Cox of Ohio bought the Atlanta Journal last year (TIME, Dec. 25), he offered Editor Hall $10,000 a year-fabulous salary for a Southern editor--and a $25,000 stock interest to leave the Advertiser, move to Atlanta. Publisher Hudson, no piker, heard of the offer, promptly met it, making 52-year-old Grover Hall probably the best-paid editor in the South.

Editor Hall's independence is his success. In 1910 Grover went to work as an editorialist on the Advertiser, started his career there by defending Alice Roosevelt Longworth's right to smoke cigarets. Editor of the Advertiser since 1926, Grover Hall won a Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for rousing attacks on racial and religious intolerance.

Plump, amiable Editor Hall rises late, always walks by a florist's shop on his way to work, buys a Talisman rose for his buttonhole. Magnificently mustachioed, he drives city editors to despair. They say anybody can walk into Grover Hall's office and persuade him not to run an unpleasant story about a suicide or an automobile smashup. Sometimes he carries a hot news tip around for days without thinking to tell the city desk about it.

Another editor once called Grover Hall "a fat radical advised by a cat named Clarabelle." Famous through the South was Clarabelle, Grover's office cat. When she died last fall, Associated Press put her obit on the wire. For the Advertiser Editor Hall wrote an editorial a column and a half long. Said he: "At this moment of sadness the Advertiser beseeches its friends and the followers of Clarabelle NOT to give this office another cat! The Advertiser is fed up on cats and does not wish to be bothered with another. . . ."

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