Two Friends and A Promise

Fifteen years ago neat, bespectacled Ralph Nicholson and brisk, blue-eyed Clayton Fritchey were ambitious "boy wonders" on the Scripps-Howard Pittsburgh Press. Nicholson, assistant business manager, dreamed of a paper of his own. Fritchey, assistant managing editor, dreamed of being editor in chief of a big city daily. When they parted in 1931, Nicholson promised Fritchey: "When I do get my paper, you'll be the editor."

This week 45-year-old Ralph Nicholson, owner-publisher of the New Orleans Item, named a new editor in chief: 40-year-old Clayton Fritchey.

Chickens on the Third Floor. Pipe-smoking Publisher Nicholson* has been all over the newspaper shop. He started as a newsboy, later reported for the Richmond (Ind.) Item, was a youthful foreign correspondent after World War I, managed the Japan Advertiser in Tokyo, cleaned up the New York Graphic. He and David E. Smiley own the Tampa Times.

Three years ago Harvard-schooled Nicholson put some of his Tampa profits into the characterless, long unprofitable New Orleans Item. He found the office picketed the day he arrived. Other Nicholson discoveries: padded circulation, discounted advertising rates, several of the low-paid editorial staff also on the Earl Long machine payroll, a run-down plant (an Item man once raised chicks in a third-floor office).

Nicholson cleaned up the paper and the plant, raised salaries, restored staff and public confidence. By last week circulation was up one-third, to 80,000. Advertising was up nearly one-third in quantity, one-fourth in rates. Owner Nicholson at last had something worth-while to offer Newsman Fritchey.

Cops behind the Bars. For the last ten years, slim, personable Clayton Fritchey's by-line has accompanied exposes and campaigns that have kept the Cleveland Press (circ. 253,540) the liveliest and one of the richest and most influential of Scripps-Howard papers.** Fritchey has been a managing editor's dream reporter with a reporter's dream assignment: to find his own news.

For one Fritchey feat, the Press won a 1937 Pulitzer citation for public service.

Fritchey set out to expose a flourishing racket in cemetery lots. Smooth-tongued promoters had turned pastures into graveyards, sold enough space to bury Cleveland's dead for 200 years to come, grifted $2,000,000 a year in sales, resales, commissions.

Questioning hundreds of victims, Fritchey came across the name of a sucker named "Dacek" who had sunk $83,000 in 4,400 grave sites. Fritchey's hunch: that "Dacek" was Louis J. Cadek, a big-bellied, mysteriously prosperous police captain. Working with Cleveland prosecutors, Fritchey traced to Captain Cadek a fortune of $109,000 in Prohibition bootleggers' bribes. When the graft cleanup was over the captain and five other high-ranking cops were in prison, several others had lost their jobs. The cemetery racket was washed up, too.

Later, a Fritchey expose sent to prison two Cleveland unionists who had sold merchants protection against window-breaking with one hand, collected bribes from painting and glazing contractors with the other.

Other Press-Fritchey campaigns have helped to defeat isolationist Congressman Martin L. Sweeney for reelection, weed out political hangers-on from the state highway department's payroll, bring about municipal ownership of Cleveland's trolley system. Once a Fritchey story unbenched a Cleveland judge who had lied about his education, aggrandized himself in a legal journal by writing a fictitious decision in an imaginary law suit which he represented as genuine.

New Orleans crooks, frauds, bumblers and mossbacks could expect the worst.

* No kin to his competitor, Publisher L. K. Nicholson of the New Orleans Times-Picayune and States.

** Fritchey has also been TIME'S Cleveland correspondent since 1938.

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