Man Over Legend

When Benjamin Harrison Reese became managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch 13 years ago, he had to compete with a legend, as well as with the lively afternoon opposition (the Star-Times). The legend was the enormous reputation of his predecessor, lofty, autocratic Oliver Kirby ("O.K.") Bovard, one of the great managing editors of his time. What made matters worse was that Bovard, before he stalked out of the P-D (at the end of a long disagreement with Publisher Joseph Pulitzer), had made it clear that he thought City Editor Ben Reese something less than a worthy successor.

At first, Ben Reese was uncomfortable in the M.E.'s high-backed chair. ("I know that even the men on the staff felt they were getting a police court managing editor," he later admitted.) But Reese was a bedrock newsman, who had started out at $8 a week on the Chief in home-town Hobart, Mo., worked on a handful of other papers before he joined the P-D in 1913. He was smart enough to capitalize on talents far different from Bovard's.

Wield the Lash. As P-D city editor for 25 years, big (6 ft. 4 in., 240 Ibs.) Ben Reese had built up a crack staff by painstaking direction and a relentless, daily wielding of the lash on staffers who failed to give him what he wanted ("Tell him the Post-Dispatch wants to know, and don't come back without the story"). He had developed many a bannerline expose through his dogged, relentless pursuit of the smallest story clue, spent as much as $50,000 to break a hot story. In 1936, for example, by sending a dozen reporters on a house-to-house canvass, he exposed a fraud in St. Louis voting registration lists, won the P-D its first Pulitzer Prize for public service. "And," he noted proudly, "Bovard didn't know a damn thing about it before I started."

As managing editor, Big Ben decided to carry on in the same way. He teed off with an expose of the $250 million Union Electric Co. of Missouri, which the P-D had been investigating off & on for years. With a drumfire of Page One stories, the paper detailed the operation of $600,000 U.E. slush funds, used to influence legislators, city officials and newsmen. Result: U.E. management was overturned and three top officers were convicted in federal court (lending color to an old P-D staffers' boast that "once the P-D is on your trail, there's nothing left but jail or suicide").

Reach for News. In succeeding years, Reese's staff reached into Illinois to prove (with the Chicago Daily News') that 51 editors and publishers had been kept on the state payroll during the administration of Governor Dwight Green. The P-D Washington bureau spotlighted the oil interests of Truman Crony Ed Pauley until

Pauley withdrew as nominee for Under Secretary of the Navy in 1946.

Last week Ben Reese, 62, had a more personal piece of news for the staff: he was retiring in June. His successor: Raymond L. Crowley (rhymes with holy), 55, P-D staffer for 29 years, city editor for 13, whom Reese had been quietly grooming for the past four years. Like Bovard, hard-boiled Ben Reese would leave his successor a legend to compete with.

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