The Salesman

Behind almost every major U.S. newspaper sale in the past ten years has been a hustling, cocksure trader whose name rarely appears in print. The men he represented got the headlines: Marshall Field III, or Akron's Jack Knight, the nation's fastest rising newspaper owner. The man-behind-the-deal got the Miami Herald for Knight, then sold him the Detroit Free Press, lock, stock and Edgar A. Guest. Five months ago, he helped Knight buy the Chicago Daily News, fourth largest afternoon paper in the U.S. His chores for Marshall Field include winning over Milton (Terry and the Pirates) Caniff from Field's opposition at $2,000 a week.

The broker of all these deals is a man named Smith Davis. A complete record of his tradings is not available, for a basic Davis credo is "my business is mystery." His trick is to bring together publishers who usually don't speak to each other on their editorial pages. He has sold conservative papers to liberals and liberal papers to conservatives, with a cheerful irreverence for editorial principles--except when they can be calculated as part of a paper's balance sheet.

Last week Davis, many times a matchmaker but never a bride in newspaper mergers, for the first time bought two papers for himself. As Davis deals go, these were small: he took over the Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald and Journal, in Jimmy Byrnes's home town, for $750,000. But this time, said Davis, there was no mystery about his business. In his plush suite in Manhattan's Waldorf Tower, he reassured anxious friends that he was still a salesman, had not suddenly started to scratch a journalistic itch. He had simply found an able young newspaperman to go partners with and do the editing (fellow Clevelander William Townes, 35, a Nieman fellow and former assistant city editor of the Cleveland Press).

Bond-Selling Halfback. Smith Davis (the kind of man who becomes "Smitty" after five minutes' acquaintance) makes it his business to get along with such unalike rich men's sons as Marshall Field and William Randolph Hearst. Now 43, Smitty is one answer to what became of the bond salesman of the fast & loose '203. A husky near-six-footer with a broad face and a bent nose, he looks like the halfback he once was (Western Reserve University). He gave up college because classes cost him money: they kept him from selling bonds. At 27, he had earned a half million dollars, and a few months later went broke in the 1929 crash.

During the depression Davis made two profitable discoveries: 1) that good newspapermen are usually bad businessmen, and 2) that good businessmen who don't know the first thing about newspapering often itch to run a paper. Mixing this knowledge with a gift of the gab, he has since juggled millions of dollars worth of newspaper investments in Miami, New Orleans, Chattanooga, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, Indianapolis and points between and beyond.

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