The Publisher's Wife

As wife of the publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times, Mrs. Mark (Willie Snow) Ethridge is a member of a rather small subdivision of womankind. Last week, at a meeting of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association in White Sulphur Springs, W. Va., Mrs. Ethridge good-naturedly explained just what was so special about being a newspaper publisher's wife.

"I'm not worthy to address newspaper publishers . . . for, as you realize more clearly than anyone else, you newspapermen already know everything . . . There s no subject on which you don't consider yourselves experts. You can rear back any time of the day or night and give out the very last word on the exploding of the hydrogen bombs, on old tribal customs in Afghanistan . . . on the making of cheese or women . . . on religion, politics, music, art, football, yoga--anything . . . Mark even knows how to get every place he's going . . . I've driven miles and miles in the wrong direction, all the time urging him to stop and inquire the way and he all the time barking, 'Relax, damn it. I know where I'm going. Remember, you're a guest in this car.' "

Then, looking at all the confident faces in the room, Mrs. Ethridge gently needled them. "In spite of knowing everything," said she, "Mark is frequently wrong. I don't understand it--and I'm positive he doesn't. In fact, I seriously doubt if he ever knows he's wrong . . . An ironic thing, though, about publishers, is that in spite of having so much confidence in themselves, they continue to read all the time."

Reading, says Mrs. Ethridge, is a hazard for the wife. "Mark and I room together . . . There I will be in the bed beside him, weary unto death, dying for sleep, and Mark will be flipping the pages of [magazines] . . . right in my face, until long past midnight. [Next morning] I am waked by him slamming the front door with all his might, trooping up the stairs, tearing the wrapper from around the [morning] paper and squashing it into a ball, then hopping back into the bed to rattle and to read until sunup. Of course, I'm wide awake by this time; but he only gives me the second section, which has a page or two of sports and half a dozen pages of classified ads. I bet I know every old gas range and chifforobe for sale in all of Kentuckiana.

"There's no ducking it. [Publishers] are hard to live with. But personally, being a writer of sorts myself [It's Greek to Me; Let's Talk Turkey], I don't mind. I keep saying to myself, 'Yes, Mark is hard to live with, but he makes good copy, and a girl can't have everything.'"

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