Boston Bargain

Boston's ailing Post, losing money at the rate of $12,000 a week, is the last thing most people would want to buy. But Boston's self-made tycoon, John Fox, 45, has won millions, big oil & gas holdings, and the biggest single bloc of Western Union (TIME, Dec. 3) by an unorthodox approach. "I buy securities when nobody loves them," says Fox. "The worse they look, the better bargain they are." By Fox's rule, the unloved Post looked like a bargain indeed. Last week, for a reported $3,100,000, he bought it.

With the 121-year-old morning daily, Financier Fox not only bought a hoary tradition, but the weirdest-looking Page One in the U.S. The Post (circ. 306,383) averages as many as 20 stories on the front page, most of them under headlines that look as if they had been made up with a shotgun. But with it Fox also got a paper which is second biggest in New England, has made plenty of money in the past, when it often outshone all its rivals for enterprise, high jinks and beats.

Belles & Bears. The man who gave the Post that reputation was Edwin A. Grozier, who, as Joseph Pulitzer's secretary, had studied under a master. When Grozier bought the Post in 1891, it had less than 3,000 circulation. Grozier sent it climbing by such stunts as opening up the society pages, previously the exclusive preserve of Beacon Hill belles, to rosy-cheeked colleens from the South Boston slums. He sent Joe Knowles, a nature lover, into the Maine woods to prove that a man could live like Adam, without clothing or utensils. Knowles came back with the skin of a bear he claimed to have trapped in a pit, wore it through Boston's streets before one of the biggest crowds in the city's history. When jeering Hearstmen claimed to have found a bullet hole in the bearskin, Knowles went back to Maine, and in front of witnesses clubbed to death a New Brunswick bear which had been brought down in a cage and released.

No other Post exploit equaled its exposure of Charles Ponzi, the foreign-exchange juggler of 1920 whose glib tongue talked Bostonians out of millions. City Editor Eddie Dunn, who got his facts from Ponzi's disgruntled pressagent, scooped the city with the news that Ponzi was actually a Canadian ex-convict. His story pricked the bubble and started Ponzi to jail.

Underground Roars. In recent years, the Post has had no firm hand at its helm. After the death of Grozier's son Richard in 1946, the paper was technically under the direction of two executors. Actually, City Editor Dunn, Managing Editor Charles R. Doyle and Sunday Editor John Griffin ran the editorial side pretty much as they liked. Sentimentally fond of the Post's slapdash makeup, they came to feel it was "just the way the readers like it."

The Post's quarters, on crowded old Washington Street, look about as quaint as its makeup. Grozier kept it that way because he did not want to change its old-fashioned appearance. When he needed more room, he dug it out underground, equipped the Post with a modern plant whose presses spread through five subterranean floors. One of the paper's major handicaps has been the advertising edge enjoyed by its competitors (Globe, Herald and Trawler, Hearst's Record and American), which have both morning & afternoon editions, enforce "combination" advertising rates for both. If a recent court decision finding such enforced rates a violation of antitrust laws (TIME, June 9) is sustained by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Post may do better. In any case, its 125 staffers are hoping that Proprietor Fox, who has breathed life into many another ailing corporation, can do the same with the Post.

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