Again, the Paris Herald

Frenchmen called it Le New York, Americans the Paris Herald. It was as much a Parisian fixture as the Cafe de la Paix, as American as the Toonerville Trolley. Founded in 1887 by James Gordon Bennett, the younger, the New York Herald Tribune, European edition, was essentially a small-town paper. It carefully avoided controversies, scrupulously reported "personals" about the rich and famous.

To the hordes of prewar tourists and expatriates who flocked from the U.S. to forgather on the banks of the Seine, a copy of the Herald was a breath from home, almost as good as meeting an old friend from Milwaukee at the Ritz Bar. To hundreds of young newspapermen, a year or two on the Herald staff meant a finishing course in elementary journalism and a lifetime of nostalgia. In city rooms and editorial sanctums all over the U.S. there are oldtimers ready at the drop of a Martini to reminisce about the Herald's drafty, dingy shop in the rue du Louvre beside a clangorous trolley line; to swap legends about the fabulous, wispy, ageless columnist "Sparrow" Robertson who sent his copy over from Harry's New York Bar and lived 20 years in Paris knowing only one word of French--ici; to quote the letter signed "Old Philadelphia Lady" (asking how to convert Centigrade into Fahrenheit) which appeared day after day for 20 years on the Herald's editorial page.

Herald oldsters shook their heads when the offices were moved in 1930 to new, shiny quarters in the fashionable Etoile district and deplored the ideological contortions by which the paper sought to preserve its German and Italian advertising. But when in 1940 perky, pint-sized British Managing Editor Eric Hawkins (who once edited a reporter's "So's your old man" into "Your father is also") published almost singlehanded the last edition of the Herald before the Boche marched in, sentimental newsmen knew the conquest of Paris was complete.

When the Allies returned, the Herald's new building, dust-laden but unharmed by the Nazis, was turned over to the Army's Stars & Stripes. Last week came good news: the Stars & Stripes would have to move over. Busy in Paris were Eric Hawkins and newly appointed Editor Geoffrey Parsons Jr., arranging to resume publication of the Herald some time before Christmas.

Young (36), stocky Geoff Parsons is well equipped for his new job. Son of the Herald Tribune's longtime chief editorial writer, he has been a newsman since his college days as a reporter on the Harvard Crimson. Organizer and for nearly five years head of the Herald Tribune's Chicago office, he was sent abroad as London correspondent in 1941, two years later became chief of the London bureau. His able dispatches on French politics presumably earned him his editorship.

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