Paper Cutter

Harold Boeschenstein's earliest memories are of paper and ink and the newspaper business. Nowadays he fervently wishes that he could forget all about them.

Pipe-smoking Harold Boeschenstein (pronounced Beshinstyne) last week sat behind an immaculate, paperless desk in Washington while about him swirled a paper-littered storm of questions, demands, complaints, pleadings and pressures. As acting director of WPB's Forest Products Bureau* he is the Government's unenvied Solomon, who has to decide who gets how much paper--and there is not enough paper to go around.

Pressed Upon. Black-browed Mr. Boeschenstein, for months one of Washington's most pressured men, is in the middle of new pressures from the press. The cause: his ruling has turned recent good news about newsprint into disappointing news for U.S. newspaper publishers.

The good news was that Canada, producer of 73% of U.S. newsprint, was upping its monthly supply from 182,000 to 200,000 tons in 1944's first half. Nursing deep paper cuts (23.6% average for newspapers), many a publisher thought this meant a healing increase in allotments would be coming their way.

Not so. Paper Czar Boeschenstein promptly announced that he would stretch no quotas, would try to build up a little surplus in newsprint supplies instead.

"Dangerous precedent ... a threat to freedom of the press," cried J. D. Gortatowsky, general manager of William Randolph Hearst's newspapers. But Czar Boeschenstein was braced to meet this kind of storm, which he had seen coming. He had allocated 20,000 tons of the extra newsprint to 65 newspapers in part replacement of WPB's 1943 borrowings distributed to quota-short publishers. Another 5,954 tons was laid aside for the extra day of Leap Year.

The WPB figures boiled down to a 1944 first-quarter reserve of only 10,979 tons, a margin of only 1.3%. These figures disposed of publishers' fears that Donald Nelson and Harold Boeschenstein were dragging the U.S. into the newsprint business.

Tougher, Tighter. Boeschenstein, after five months in his paper-cutting post, had served notice that he was running a tougher and tighter Printing and Publishing Division of WPB.

The nation's 1,800 daily newspapers, 9,000 to 10,000 weeklies, 7,750 magazines, the untotaled house organs are but a small part of calm Mr. Boeschenstein's troubles. He also has to deal with a multiplicity of other problems inherent in many other uses of wood products: from income-tax forms and war bonds to delivery of paper-wrapped ammunition in wooden boxes and V-boxes. His efforts go not alone to an equitable chopping of the wood pile, but also to prodding production toward a larger pile.

No Future, No Action. Trim, 47-year-old Mr. Boeschenstein was drafted late in 1942 from the presidency of rich, war-busy Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp., which he and Amory Houghton put together in 1938 to exploit Owens-Illinois and Corning Glass Works' progressive research in glass fibers.

He landed in the glass business in 1921 after he had decided that there was not much future in the newspaper business and "not enough action in the banking business." He had grown up in his father's rural daily newspaper in Edwardsville, Ill., studied journalism at the University of Illinois, worked for Chicago's City News Bureau and the Tribune. His conclusion: most newsmen burn out young.

* He also heads Productions Controls Bureau, dealing with such crucial materials as steel, copper, aluminum.

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