Two Suns & a Star

Until last week, the once-bright Seattle Star (circ. 67,000) had spent most of its 48 years flickering as fitfully as a moist match. Started in gold-rush days by the late, lusty E. W. Scripps, it grew up as a crusading, loud-mouthed friend of the people, was once worth around $3,000,000.

But in the fumbling hands of Scripps's grandsons, Ed and Jim (it was never a part of the Scripps-Howard chain), the Star became the third daily in a town whose advertisers really needed only two. In hand-to-mouth depression days, its underpaid editors* never knew how final their final edition might be. To keep their minds off impending doom, they used to fire BB shot from slingshots at customers entering the palmistry parlors and bordellos across Seventh Avenue.

For the past five years a dozen Seattle businessmen, most of whom knew nothing about newspapering, had owned the Star. Last week they sold out (for a profitable $400,000) to a flashily rising press lord the Pacific Northwest was suddenly hearing about. In less than a month Sheldon F. (for Fred) Sackett, 44, had bought the Vancouver (Wash.) Sun, acquired a weekly (he rechristened it the Sun, too) across the Columbia River at Portland, Ore., and snatched, for a small down payment, a million-dollar Portland printing plant. He had served notice on Portland's venerable Oregonian and the Oregon Journal that they would have some competition "by apple blossom time." Fortified with income from three radio stations and his Coos Bay Times ("westernmost daily in the U.S."), he was making threatening gestures toward Spokane, Boise and points south--as far as San Francisco.

Interviewers who tried to pin down Sheldon Sackett found him as jumpy as a flea circus, and as vague as a summer breeze. He likes crimson shirts and flossy hotel suites, which he roams with Groucho Marxian energy, gulping strategically placed drinks of Scotch, nibbling toast, bawling into telephones, thrusting laploads of handouts on his visitors. The handouts range from his financial statements (sound enough) to his theories about what ails the U.S. press (mostly sound effects).

Wrap It Up. Sackett got into the newspaper business at eight, with a product printed on wrapping paper in Sheridan, Ore., has been fascinated by it ever since.

In 1930 he settled down at Coos Bay, a busy lumber town on Oregon's southern coast, where he began saving for his present big expansion, largely financed by Cleveland Newspaper Broker Smith Davis. Sackett decided that his chain would be "owned by the men who run it, run by the men who own it." The motto will appear on the masthead of the Seattle Star, and Sackett's employees will "eventually" hold (but may not bequeath) 49% of the stock. The new boss said airily that he was out to "restore the press to the people." Seattle would be satisfied if he would just restore the Star as a newspaper.

* According to a favorite Star story, the Scripps boys learned that a city editor's salary had been raised from $22.70 a week to $25, and sternly directed that "the central office hereafter shall review all increases in the higher brackets."

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