Doctor in the House

Colonel Guy T. Viskniskki is celebrated as a newspaper doctor, an efficiency expert. He is tough, ruthless, and almost as bald as a hard-boiled egg. Called in to operate on the frumpy Portland Oregonian in 1934, Efficiency Man Viskniskki took one look and laid about him with his cleaver. Deadheads rolled, deadwood was chopped away, and the "old lady of Alder Street" woke up with her face lifted.

An interested witness to the Colonel's drastic surgery was young Edwin Palmer ("Ep") Hoyt, the Oregonian's sharp-eyed managing editor. Last week, having left the streamlined old lady for Denver's "hussy of Champa Street" (TIME, Feb. 18), Ep Hoyt was warming up to a doctoring job of his own on the Denver Post.

But his technique was far subtler than Viskniskki's. When Hoyt moved into Bonfils & Tammen's famous "red room" at the Post, no screaming headlines but a modest front-page story recorded his arrival. Staffers met Hoyt and his wife at a city-room reception, liked them on sight. Muttered one old hand: "It's like a warm breath of spring in an icebox."

Next day Hoyt began tinkering with the Post's horrendous, circus-poster typography, told his editors to shorten the wordy leads on news stories, stop "jumping" stories from Page One. He quickly won the women. First he abolished the old rule against women smoking in the city room. Then he ordered women's lounges installed at once. He gave backshop employes a $3-a-week raise; the rival Scripps-Howard Rocky Mountain News, caught flatfooted, had to follow suit. Last week Hoyt sent a legman legging it on a 13-state assignment to retrieve its famed regional coverage.

The Post for 20 years has loudly spoken its mind not through editorials but through an anonymous Page Two feature, belligerently anti-New Deal and belligerently titled "That's That." Publisher Hoyt deftly drew a line between the column's attitude and the paper's by ordering a by-line over wiry, red-haired Bruce A. Gustin's column. Hoyt bally-booed his changes in front-page blurbs.

The rival News promptly blurbed back. The News bragged that it had "the only complete editorial page" in town. Nobody who knew Ep Hoyt thought he would be without an editorial page for long.

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