The Last Showdown

On the Toronto Star, Canada's biggest, lustiest and most profitable daily, the highest accolade a newsman could receive was a penciled "OK--H.C.H." on his copy. The initials were those of President Harry Comfort Hindmarsh, 69, long known as Canada's toughest newspaper boss. Many Canadian newsmen even insisted that a reporter who had not been hired and fired by Harry Hindmarsh was still a cub.

Missouri-born Editor Hindmarsh started out as a reporter for the Star in 1912, was named city editor one year later. In 1933 Hindmarsh (who married Publisher Joseph Atkinson's daughter in 1915) became vice president in charge of the editorial departments, fully earned his job with his driving energy, his legendary zeal for pumping money and manpower into a good story, his ruthless discipline of staffers who failed to meet his exacting standards. Ernest Hemingway, Pierre van Paassen and many other famed authors worked as young reporters on his ever-changing staff in the years when Hindmarsh was turning the struggling Star and Star Weekly into Canada's most valuable single newspaper property (circulation: 408,545), with Toronto real-estate alone worth $7,000,000.

When Publisher Atkinson died in 1948, he left the paper to a charitable foundation that he had set up to avoid paying crippling inheritance taxes. To comply with an Ontario law that sets a seven-year limit on ownership of businesses by philanthropic groups, the paper technically should have been put up for sale last April. But when Canadian Beer Tycoon E. P. Taylor offered $25 million for the Star, three of the five directors vetoed the sale out of respect for Atkinson's oft-stated hope that the Star would remain in his family's or employees' hands. In May, when U.S. Newspaper Broker Nelson Levings. representing a U.S.-Canadian syndicate, offered the directors $22.5 million, he was told: "The paper is not for sale at this time."

But Star President Hindmarsh had little time for sentiment (he was famed for mass firings on Christmas Eve), was determined to sell the Star to the highest bidder. Early last week Hindmarsh went to the Star office ready to force a showdown with the foundation directors. Two directors who had doggedly held out against a sale were longtime Star employees; Hindmarsh gruffly demanded and got their resignation, replaced them with two more tractable executives. Director Joseph Atkinson Jr., the late publisher's son, and Hindmarsh's wife, the fifth director, voted with him, and within 48hours the competing evening Telegram broke the first story that the Star was on the block. But the effort to chart the Star's course was more of a strain than even tough Harry Hindmarsh realized. The same day he suffered a heart attack, died within three hours. The Star, which at Hindmarsh's insistence ran no story on the impending sale, carried instead the obituary that ailing Editor Hindmarsh, with characteristic efficiency, had ordered written in 1952.

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