Big Roy

In Missouri towns as far east as Boonville, and in Kansas towns all the way out to the Colorado line, people once more found newspapers in their mailboxes, and felt in touch with the world again. A few even wrote the editor, to tell him that after those 17 empty days without the paper, "life is getting back into the old groove."

The Kansas City Star, recovering from the first shutdown in its 66 years, knew just how they felt: it always does. In its Midwestern heartland the Star is much more than an institution: it is part of the bloodstream, a landmark as indigenous as the Kaw River, waving wheat, stubbled prairie, Prohibition and Republicanism.

Last week the Star was in mourning. The day after its presses had rolled (after a carriers' strike), its white-haired president, Earl McCollum, had died. The man who took command last week, after briskly settling the strike, was ably affable Roy Allison Roberts, 59, the fat and florid extrovert who, as managing editor for 19 years, has been the driving force behind the strongest newspaper monopoly in the U.S.

Business as Usual. He would obviously do nothing drastic. The Star's quiet grey makeup, so strange to outsiders, so reassuring to its readers, would be kept, like a cluttered desk whose owner says: "I know it looks like a mess but I know just where everything is." Readers would still find the big stories of the day in columns 1, 3, 6 and 8 of Page One, under unassuming heads (only twice before 1929* and about 20 times since has any 8-column headline appeared in the Star), and the day's best feature story halfway down column 4 or 7.

And, of course, the morning Times and evening Star (combined circ. 725,000) would continue to blanket Kansas and western Missouri, as the biggest paper in both states. "The boss of the Star," a businessman-politician reflected last week, "is the most important man in Kansas at any given moment--more important than Alf Landon, Arthur Capper, Clyde Reed, all the congressmen and the Governor all wrapped up together. The State of Kansas is exactly what the Star wants it to be; it won't change until the Star decides it's time." The Star lived in the same city as Tom Pendergast and his machine, and respectfully recorded his comings & goings in the society columns. Then in 1936 the Star started his downfall with an exposure of vote padding.

Like the men who run it, the Kansas City Star lives the quietly comfortable life of a well-liked, well-to-do Midwesterner. Its conservatism is structural, for its owners are 172 key employees. In salary and dividends, they draw up to $50,000 a year. Even one of its police reporters, William Moorhead, is a country-clubbing capitalist. During the depression, the Star laid off no one, cut no salaries. The American Newspaper Guild has never made much headway on its staff. Staunchly Republican, the Star makes a point of getting along with the right kind of Democrats, like Roy Roberts' sometime poker and drinking companion, Harry Truman.

Ingrown Heirs. As a self-sustaining satrapy, the Star grows its own bosses. Roy Roberts began as a carrier boy in Lawrence, was a campus correspondent at the University of Kansas (he was there with Alf Landon). He covered first state, then nation politics, got his news by getting friendly with the men who made it. "I never cared much for press conferences," says Roberts. "I always liked to get my stuff out the back door."

His political acquaintance spread faster than back-door gossip. He has covered every national convention since the Bull Moosers met in 1912, and was masterminding Landon's 1936 campaign before Hearst even knew the Governor's name. Roy is still the star reporter of the Star.

See Roy. Since 1928, when he came home from Washington to be managing editor, Roy Roberts has been the man to see in Kansas City--to get elected, to build a hospital, to get things into the paper or to keep them out.

In the wide-open city room that Founder William Rockhill Nelson planned that way, Roy Roberts is easy to see and hard to miss. No secretaries shield him, but callers have to compete with clubwomen, clergymen, panhandlers, bankers, ward-heelers--and reporters who sit in the edges of nearby desks, eyes cocked for an opening. The man to see sits in shirtsleeves, chomping a frayed cigar, nodding vigorously, his stomach like a bolster between him and the desk.

Roberts is a 300-lb. mass of steaming energy. He starts his day at 6:30a.m. in bed over coffee, orange juice and his morning Times. At 9 he roams the newsroom, mussing a sportswriter's hair, thwacking the telegraph editor on the back. He shakes hands with the copy girls, greets the office pink as Comrade, the city-desk horseplayer as Seabiscuit, the Navy veterans as Admiral. The rest of the day, he holds court.

It's on Me. He loves to buy drinks for the boys, and they love to let him. He also treats himself--to whopping feasts (thick steaks of corn-fed beef, hot biscuits, baked and buttery potatoes, lots of black pepper and paprika). Six years ago he tried to reduce, got irritable ruptured an eardrum and his appendix, went back to gourmandizing, and has felt fine ever since. Saturday nights, after drinks, a steam bath, a rubdown and dinner at the Kansas City Club, he goes back to work: "so the rest of the staff can't say that the big fat bastard is loafing."

When his day is done, Roy Roberts lies abed reading far into the night. He gets through a book or two a week, half a dozen magazines (including the New Republic and the Nation, "to see what the nuts are up to"). Now that he has the title as well as the function of head man, he will still give his audience in public, out in the open in the newsroom. "If I couldn't see people and hear what was going on," he says, "I'd be unable to work. I'd get fidgety."

*For the World War I armistice and President Harding's death.

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