Hired Pilots

In the year since Founder Joseph Medill Patterson's death, the circulation of the irreverent and inimitable tabloid New York Daily News continued to shoot up. The U.S. newspaper with the most readers now has 2,375,000 daily customers and 4,800,000 on Sundays. Yet Joe Patterson's old title of president was unfilled. At first most of the trade bet that cousin Robert Rutherford (Chicago Tribune) McCormick and sister Eleanor Medill (Washington Times-Herald) Patterson would soon move in. But even Bertie and Cissie could see that the News was doing fine without them, in the hands of two home-town boys: Francis M. Flynn, the general manager, and Richard W. Clarke, the executive editor. Last week Bertie, Cissie and fellow directors of Chicago's Tribune Co? (which owns the Daily News) gave them top-drawer titles.

Flynn, who had worked his way to a salary of more than $100,000 a year, inherited Joe Patterson's old title of president of the News; Dick Clarke, another $100,000-a-year hand, was re-elected secretary. Colonel McCormick made it clear that he was content to confine himself to his Tribune. Said he to a friend: "I don't want to mix in. The trouble with Hearst is that all his papers sound and look alike. I want the News and the Chicago Tribune to be different. Dick Clarke worked under Patterson so long he knows the situation by heart."

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