In a Corner, on the 13th Floor

As Collier's roving political reporter, Walter Davenport had a free hand to go where he pleased, and, within limits, to write what he wanted. He liked the job. He also liked his farm in Winsted, Conn., which had a lot of shade maples and easy chairs under them. But last week, 57-year-old Walter Davenport became editor of Collier's, the eleventh in a line which has included Norman Hapgood, Finley Peter Dunne and Mark Sullivan. His immediate predecessor, Henry La Cossitt, was out after just two years; the brass thought he was tightening Collier's free-swinging ways too much.

After 21 years as associate editor, Davenport moved into the corner office on the 13th floor of 250 Park Avenue. Said he: "I don't know anything about the job-- but in a week or so I may." He had been "broadly uneducated" at several schools before he quit the University of Pennsylvania as a sophomore. ("The magazines had bought a few of my stories and it completely ruined me.") As an infantryman in World War I he went from private to captain, was badly wounded.

In 1920 the late grocery tycoon, Frank Munsey, buyer and killer of newspapers, hired him for the New York Sun, assigned him to "go out and find out what is the matter with America." Then, in 1923, Captain Joseph Medill Patterson "bought me a very fancy lunch at the Ritz," offered him the managing editorship of a magazine to be called Liberty. Davenport said he didn't know anything about editing, Patterson said: "That's fine; then you've nothing to unlearn. Go right to work." Two years later, after being told that "no one would be annoyed if you found another job," Davenport went to Collier's.

He has covered every major political campaign since, and a lot of minor ones, writing them up in the chatty, offhand Collier's style, long on anecdote and short on big, dull facts.'Like Collier's Quentin Reynolds, Kyle Crichton and Jim Marshall, he is a swift, easy writer. He regards his promotion as more of the same formula that gets Collier's its 2,846,052 circulation: slight, slick fiction; articles serious in subject, light in treatment; the simple, direct editorials of Reuben Maury who (for a price) writes another kind for the late Joe Patterson's New York Daily News. Says Editor Davenport: "I intend to edit the magazine from a reporter's viewpoint. No ivory tower."

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