Uncle Tom Steps Down

The liberal Louisville Courier-Journal (circ. 167,727) and its breadwinning sister, the afternoon Times (168,858), have two links with the good old days of fire-breathing Editor "Marse Henry" Watterson. One is their old-fashioned home on Liberty Street, where another local monopoly--the post office--once dwelt. The other is doughty, ice-blue-eyed Tom Wallace, editor of the Times, whom Marse Henry hired to get a youthful viewpoint into his crochety editorial page.

Last week the papers prepared to break with their past. In mid-September, they will move to an ultramodern new building (ten blocks below the Mason-Dixon line). In the same week Editor Wallace will retire. In a sense, both departures are overdue. The new plant, budgeted to cost $3,000,000, has already eaten up $7,000,000 and will open 18 months late. And at 73, "Uncle Tom" Wallace is eight years past the paper's retirement age.

Cryptic Brevity. A native Kentuckian (born in a town called Hurricane), Tom Wallace joined the Times, at no pay, in 1900. He was 31 when Watterson made him the youngest member of the Courier-Journal editorial-page crew. Thirteen years later, when Marse Henry quit in a huff (because Owner Robert Worth Bingham came out for the League of Nations), Wallace switched to the Times as chief editorial writer. He has been there ever since, driving at dawn from his 150-acre dairy farm to fire his pungent editorial missiles through the composing room tubes.

"I made a rule," he says, "that no editorial should be longer than a lead pencil." His brevity sometimes results in editorials so cryptic that readers dub it the "daily puzzle page." Once a politician, after reading a Wallace editorial about himself, asked a staffer: "Is he for me or against me?" The reporter couldn't say.

Nature Boy. Unlike Marse Henry Watterson and his famous "to hell with the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns," Wallace has never been known for outspoken editorials on politics. But no one ever doubted where Uncle Tom stood on conservation, good will toward Latin America, snakes (he was a live-&-let-live man), or steel traps (he thought them inhumane). His most famous campaign was a five-year struggle which saved Cumberland Falls from a utilities syndicate headed by Sam Insull.

Three other oldsters will retire with Wallace, and in a long-delayed reshuffling of the staff, scholarly Russell Briney, 48, will move over from the C-J to replace him as editor. Wallace will contribute three columns a week. "I'll be interested to see," he mused, "if being editor emeritus has the same leverage."

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