Mr. Townes Goes to Town

On the ailing Tacoma (Wash.) Times, many a boss had come & gone. So when their newest boss called a staff meeting, newsmen merely yawned. But Editor Willam A. Townes, stoop-shouldered and deceptively mild looking, jerked them awake. He had heard ugly stories about newsroom graft. From now on, anybody who took money on the side would be fired on the spot. Within 48 hours, Townes wanted typed confessions of what had gone on.

Two staffers confessed to running a downtown office where they took fees for getting publicity into the Times. Several were paid regular retainers by politicians. One reporter was charging $2 a head to Tacomans who wanted their pictures in the paper. Owners Ed and Jim Scripps, grandsons of the late E. W. ("Lusty") Scripps, did little in the way of removing temptation by raising wages. Said Ed Scripps: "I didn't know reporters were taking money but things weren't as bad on the Times as they are on other papers on the West Coast."

Townes thought that an honest staff--and a few pay raises--would work better. Last week, five months after Townes came to town, the better and cleaner Times reached 47,077 circulation (up 4,000). In news coverage it was giving the staid Tacoma News-Tribune a run for its money. Crusading editorials against gambling in taverns and the poor transit system had ousted the canned variety, and Townes was eyeing the circulation. territory of the nearby Seattle Times (no kin).

Sandy-haired Bill Townes, 38, has been crusading since he was 13. As a page in knee pants at the Oklahoma legislature, he wrote a critical piece on the state senate, shyly showed it to a reporter. Next day it was splashed across the top of Page One in the daily Oklahoman. Instead of firing him, the impressed senators promoted him to chief page. When he grew up, Townes trained on the Scripps-Howard Cleveland Press, went to Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship (1942). Three years later, with Cleveland Newspaper Broker Smith Davis, he took over the Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald and Journal. Townes gingered it up enough to net him a $55,000 profit when he and Davis sold out last year.

He went west as editor of the Seattle Star, switched to the Tacoma Times just before the Star winked out in a forced sale last year (TIME, Aug. 25). The Scripps brothers, down to the last four links of a western chain that once had eleven papers, invited him (at around $12,000 a year) to beef up the Times. Newsmen wondered if the Scripps brothers could digest Townes's robust journalism. If they could, the guess is that Townes will get the bigger job of running the chain.

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