Lima's New Citizen

Though for 25 years bustling Lima, Ohio (pop. 55,700) had supported only one newspaper, a second daily was born there last week and thousands cheered. Reason: Limaites had come to hate their longtime standby, the Lima News. The News was long regarded as a forward-looking, studiously fair paper, and it was seldom, if ever, attacked for abusing its monopoly position in Lima (pronounced as in Lima bean). But people started changing their minds about the News in February 1956, when the family-owned paper was sold to Raymond Cyrus Hoiles (TIME, Dec. 31, 1951) and his Freedom Newspapers.

A crabby, Bible-spouting zealot who already owned ten small dailies from Santa Ana, Calif. to Pampa, Texas, Ohio-born Publisher Hoiles, now 78, was famed for his ultrareactionary political philosophy and his one-man campaign against a series of things he wrapped up under one label: socialism. By Hoiles's definition, socialistic institutions include: public schools, churches, public libraries, taxes, majority rule, highways, unions, and the National Association of Manufacturers.

Counterattack. Soon after Hoiles took over, the evening News reversed its longtime policy, began to squawk "socialism" at many programs that had widespread support among business and professional leaders. In quick succession the paper 1) helped defeat a proposal to fluoridate the city water, 2) successfully opposed a municipal parking project to relieve downtown congestion, 3) cold-shouldered a fund drive for the community-backed convalescent home, and 4) denounced the city council's plans to replace a 50-year-old public library. The News's editorials on the library issue finally jolted civic leaders into counterattacking with a community-wide drive to put over an $880,000 library bond issue.

At the November election, 92% of Lima's registered voters trooped to the polls and approved the project by the biggest majority (76%) ever given a bond issue in the city's history. Next day a parking meter outside the News sprouted a sign: HOILES, GO HOME! Said Laurence H. Larsen, executive vice president of Superior Coach Co.: "Everything possible has been done to alienate every single group in town since Hoiles took over. They couldn't have done a better job of it if they had planned it this way."

In a prosperous manufacturing city whose industries are predominantly organized, Hoiles's virulently antiunion views quickly antagonized labor and provoked Hoiles's first big fight right in his own shop. To cut costs, the News's Publisher E. Robert McDowell, a longtime Hoiles-man (and onetime printer), dropped the paper's staff-written business column, trimmed admen's commissions. Hoiles had agreed to honor the News's American Newspaper Guild contract with editorial and business office staffers, but employees had no hope of renewing the one-year contract,when it expired last February. Many longtime staffers quit and were replaced by nonunion newsmen from other Hoiles papers. In May, when contract negotiations broke down, the Guild called a strike. Circulation dropped steadily (from 35,107 to an estimated 22,000), advertising dwindled despite rate cuts of as much as 50%.

"Civic Responsibility." While most Limaites sympathized with the strikers, the News would almost certainly have made a comeback if it had not been for its top ad salesman, tall (6 ft. 4 in.), persuasive Wayne G. Current. Live-wire Current, who quit the paper when Publisher McDowell cut commissions, decided to rally financial support for a new daily in Lima, and approached Sam Kamin and James A. Howenstine, two self-made industrialists who head Lima's Neon Products, Inc. (1956 gross: $7,000,000). The partners put up $100,000 and, at Current's suggestion, decided to sell $200,000 worth of stock in order to make the new paper a community project. Its name: the Lima Citizen. Of more than 1,000 Limaites who bought up the shares, only some 150 invested more than $125 each. "I bought stock as a civic responsibility," said one businessman.

Salesman Current, appointed business manager, found a complete newspaper plant for sale at Charleston, W. Va. Able Editor Bob Barton, who had also quit the News, was lured back from the Cleveland Plain Dealer as the Citizen's editor; 76 other News staffers and 130 of 164 News carrier boys came to work for the new paper. "It's just like the News had picked up and moved," exulted one reporter. Salesmen signed up their old clients. Circulation men built an advance readership of 22,000.

Middle-of-the-Road Survival. Last week the first, fat issue of the evening Citizen rolled off the presses in a converted warehouse. Within hours 8,000 newsstand copies had been snapped up; subscribers jammed the Citizen's switchboard with calls of congratulation. Said Kamin: "With the climate Hoiles created, we couldn't miss."

Some of the new paper's best friends doubt that the community can support two dailies--and fear for the $300,000 Citizen's chances in an all-out war with the $2,800,000 News. Nonetheless, Citizen staffers (who have been promised union contracts) are confident that a progressive, middle-of-the-road Republican paper modeled faithfully on the oldtime News cannot fail. "If we can't survive with the kind of help everyone is giving us," said Editor Barton, "then we're just poor newspapermen."

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