Dealey of Dallas

Of the 1,800 daily newspapers in the U.S., a great many make money. Some are also good newspapers. One is the Dallas News. As a painstaking purveyor of the news and a slave-driving civic conscience, it is almost as deep in the heart of Texas as the Alamo.

The News is the lengthening shadow of a man named George B. Dealey, who came to the U.S. by windjammer from England, caught on with the Galveston News as an office boy. At 26, his bosses sent him to Dallas to found a duplicate of their paper.

Dealey gave Dallas the kind of personal journalism that Texans cottoned to. The News took on the powerful Ku Klux Klan in a death battle, and won. Dealey crusaded against gambling, turned down a fortune in oil stock advertising.

The News hewed to the Democratic--but not the New Deal--line, backed only two Republicans (McKinley and Dewey) for President. It fought the isolationists of both World Wars.

The boss was a little man with a neat white mustache and strait-laced ideals. He hung pictures of another great Texan on every wall at the plant, drummed Davy Crockett's motto ("Be sure you're right, then go ahead") into Son E. M. ("Ted") Dealey.

Last week, after putting in his usual nine-hour day at the office, the old man hung up his black alpaca coat and went home. Next day, Death (of a heart attack) came to George Bannerman Dealey at 86. Ted Dealey would carry on.

Another publisher, more of a merchant than a crusader, died last week at 85. Gardner Cowles of Des Moines, a small town Iowa banker who turned to publishing at 42, made a fetish of circulation, made his fair, unexciting Register and Tribune an Iowa habit. Sons Gardner Jr. ("Mike") and John, more journalistically adventurous than their father, have spread the Cowles empire into the Minneapolis field, into five radio stations, a feature syndicate, Look magazine.

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