The Sun Comes Out

At 12:09 one foggy night last week a fleet of shiny, grass-green news trucks started careening out of the loading tunnel of the Daily News Building, roared into Chicago's Loop, swerved with loud honking to crash halts at crowded newsstands. "Yo!" yelled the drivers, "the Sun is out!" Fat bundles of papers pitched to the sidewalk, melted like snow on a griddle a few minutes after they were ripped open. Sometimes the newsstand crowd cheered. Chicago was grabbing Vol. 1, No. 1 of Marshall Field's new 2-c- morning paper, the Tribune-challenging Chicago Sun.

What Chicago saw was a full-size, 72-page first edition with format and typography resembling a cross between the New York Herald Tribune and Silliman Evans' Nashville Tennessean. It had a good sports section, competent Washington dispatches, but was weak on writing, painfully weak on comics (mostly new). Advertising-wise its first issue was fat to bursting (over 300 columns), with a listing of 150 advertisers who were turned away (though much of it doubtless came under the same heading as the twelve-page section of congratulatory letters).

All night the News's twelve big presses rolled full blast. Toward morning the delivery chutes spewed bundles faster than the trucks could take them away. Taxis were commandeered. By 6 a.m., when the presses had to be cleared for the Daily News, the Sun run was 896,000 copies of a 72-page, ad-filled issue to sell to curious Chicagoans.

The big question was how much the Sun's circulation would be when the curiosity sale was over and the Sun settled down as one of Chicago's regular newspapers.

Peace on Earth. What excited Chicago was the prospect of epic and maybe head-busting battle between the Sun and Colonel McCormick's ferocious Tribune, backed on both sides by all that millions can buy.

Nobody got hurt as the newspaper war began. Night before the first issue Sun Circulation Manager Jack Stenbuck, a big, picturesque ex-Hearstman with the appearance of a well-dressed pirate, called 150 truck drivers into conference. A good part of them were Hearst veterans and well remembered the slugging days when "McCormick used to put it on us." Said Circulation Manager Stenbuck:

"I have been asked what the sailing orders will be. This is going to be a friendly operation. We are not going out with our fists swinging. We are working for a very dignified gentleman, and we don't want to embarrass him."

First Punches. Likewise to Chicago Tribune drivers word had gone down: "No rough stuff." To its carriers the Tribune said: "The Tribune is not concerned whether you do or do not handle the Chicago Sun. However, if you desire to handle it, the Tribune reserves the right to appoint other agents to handle the Tribune."

The Sun was swamped with telephone calls demanding to know why home deliveries were not being made. Fact is that a home delivery service is a major organization job, and not even the "Great Stenbuck" can build one short of months. Loop newsstands suddenly refused to handle the Sunday Sun ("The Tribune did it," said Publisher Evans). And although the Sun built 2,000 wooden stands for such an emergency, it had to beat a city ordinance requiring steel stands.

In the Tribune's news columns the birth of the Chicago Sun--biggest press news of the year--was ignored. But in its home-delivered edition readers discovered a stuffer (onepage leaflet) reprinting two memos from London Correspondent Larry Rue quoting British papers' references to Marshall Field as "an enthusiastic Anglophile."

Day before the Sun came out, a full-page Tribune ad shouted its devotion to Truth: THE TRIBUNE DOES NOT PRINT FAKE STORIES OR LEND ITS COLUMNS TO PROPAGANDA DESIGNED TO MISLEAD THEM. . . . THE STEADFAST POLICY OF THE TRIBUNE IS TO PRINT THE TRUTH. . . .

But these were only pinpricks at the pro-Roosevelt Sun compared with the Tribune's nicely timed expose of President Roosevelt's "confidential" plans for an A.E.F. of 5,000,000 men.

The Sun likewise made no mention of the Tribune. But it took as its stand the belief that "the best interests of Chicago, of the Midwest and of America can best be served at this moment by the complete defeat of Adolf Hitler and everything he stands for."

The Sun still had no A.P. franchise, and its negotiations to buy the only one available from Hearst were stalled on the question of price.

The Sun also is due for many a headache before it learns how metropolitan circulation works, and especially a metropolis which Colonel McCormick got to first.

Best summing up of circulation troubles ahead was that of Bulldog Circulator Carmi Pastouchi, a stocky ex-Hearstman and truck drivers' hero who looks like a stock character out of Little Caesar. Commented he on the first night's sellout: "Dis don't mean nothin'. What is it gonna be six months from now?"

Whatever is gonna be six months from now, the Sun had already upset the status quo in Chicago publishing. Dozens of rumors were afoot. One was that Colonel McCormick, who has already applied for an afternoon A.P. franchise, would launch a new 1-c- tabloid to be run by his able cousin Captain Joe Patterson of the New York Daily News. Another was that Marshall Field might buy Frank Knox's Chicago Daily News and make it an all-day newspaper war between Field and McCormick.

As war flashed to Chicago the Sun beat the Tribune to the streets with the news. The Sun's war extra hit the streets at 4:30 p.m. -- while the Sunday Tribune still headlined: U.S. NAVY SEIZES FINN SHIPS. The Tribune did not get out an extra.

But in its Monday paper the Tribune sought to make up for lost time. Under the headline JAPAN ATTACKS U.S. it ran a three-column cartoon captioned "At Your Service," showing "Every American" saluting the flag (in red, white & blue). Its page-one editorial declared: "All of us, from this day forth, have but one task. That is to strike with all our might. . . ." As crowning patriotic touch the Tribune restored its old masthead slogan from Stephen Decatur: "Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong."

Thus, three days after the Sun came out, the most publicized issue in the McCormick-Field newspaper war -- isolation v. intervention -- was dissolved instantly by the acids of far more consequential war in the Pacific.

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