Lease on Life

Under sentence of death, Manhattan's PM had won three reprieves from Owner Marshall Field. Last week, he finally found a buyer. He sold a "majority interest" in his tabloid to San Francisco Lawyer Bartley C. Crum and Joseph Barnes, foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune. They were mum on how much they paid--and who was backing them. But they said they had "adequate" cash to continue PM, now losing $15,000 a week. (Minority Stockholder Field will still foot part of the loss.)

As Publisher Crum and Editor Barnes moved into PM's modest home in the produce district of lower Manhattan, they front-paged an appeal: "Don't expect to see a new name right away, or a new format, or an entirely different typography . . . There will be many changes, but they will be gradual . . . aimed at a full coverage of news and an independent editorial policy." Translated Bart Crum: "We are absolutely uncommitted to anybody." But the policy will be left of center.

For the next three months PM staffers, who have already been given severance pay, will be on probation. Their new bosses may hire & fire at will.

Corporations & Crusades. As a team, Crum & Barnes had much in common. They had labored for many a cause, including Wendell Willkie's. Both were eager, intense men, and neither was wealthy.

At 47, Bartley Cavanaugh Crum is still boyish, slick-haired, talkative and leftish. Once a cub on the Sacramento Bee, he was a U.P. stringer on the Berkeley campus of the University of California ('22), then spent 14 years in the office of Hearst Attorney John Francis Neylan before striking out for himself. Now a high-priced corporation lawyer, Bart Crum has found time to ride off on many a leftist crusade. His latest: counsel for Hollywood's "unfriendly ten" writers and producers.

A former national officer of the Independent Citizens' Committee, he bolted his party in 1944 to be national chairman of the Independent Republicans for Roosevelt. He recently quit the Progressive Citizens of America when it went for Wallace. His service on the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine turned him into an author (Behind the Silken Curtain); he is now an ardent advocate of partition. In moving to Manhattan, he will give up, among other things, the presidency of two radio stations owned by Ted and Dorothy Thackrey, owners of the New York Post.

One Worldling. No crusader, but an able newsman on a left-of-center course, is smooth, bespectacled Joe Barnes, 41, brother of Howard Barnes, the Trib's drama critic. (A third brother, Bernard, is assistant to TIME'S Vice President Howard Black.) A professor's son who was Crimson president at Harvard ('27), Joe Barnes did postgraduate work at the University of London's King's College and has batted around the world for 20 years as a student, a researcher for the Institute of Pacific Relations, and a journalist. A prewar Herald Tribune correspondent in Moscow and Berlin, he was a deputy director of OWI's overseas operations, a fellow traveler on Willkie's "one world" flight, and translator of Soviet Novelist Konstantin Simonov's Days and Nights.

Why had Crum & Barnes thrown over secure careers to gamble on making a newspaper out of PM? Said Joe Barnes: "A challenge I couldn't resist." Said Bart Crum: "America has been running the wrong way since the fall of Germany. There's been a decline of faith. We want to help rebuild faith in the U.S. and in peace."

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