Home-Coming

Not much money but a lot of sentiment went into a Seattle newspaper deal last week. Two homesick newspapermen threw up good jobs "back East" to go home to Seattle and try to make something of the struggling Seattle Star, bought from the badly eroded Scripps League chain for $160,000 (it was once worth around $3,000,000).

Buyer was redheaded, tough, 51-year-old Howard W. Parish, who got eleven Seattle businessmen to put up the money. As manager of the Jacksonville (Fla.) Journal since 1937, he boosted that paper's circulation from 39,000 to 55,000. Parish's happiest days had been spent on the Seattle Star, where he rose from newsboy to president and general manager of the Scripps-Canfield chain. In the days before the Scripps boys began meddling with the Star, he had built up the best circulation in the State.

With Publisher Parish to Seattle last week went the Star's onetime best editor, 54-year-old Abraham Hurwitz, who rose from office boy, trained a generation of reporters who are still Seattle's best newsmen. Since 1940 Hurwitz, one of the homeliest newspapermen alive, has been editor of the Western Newspaper Union (feature syndicate for small weeklies).

Publisher Parish will make the Star a full-sized paper again (after ten months as a tabloid), try to restore the paper's long-lost reputation as the "People's Paper" and win back circulation, now down to 62,000 from its onetime 104,000. But he will have to work fast: his working capital is only about $50,000.

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