To the Mat!

In the third-floor composing room of the Chicago Sun-Times last week, a forklift truck nosed up to a clattering Linotype and tweaked it away from under the operator's fingers. Backing out, the tractor trundled the two-ton Linotype to a special elevator hoist that whisked it into a waiting truck on Franklin Street. Twenty minutes later the Linotype, its lead still molten, clattered back into action at the new $20 million Sun-Times building on the north side of the Chicago River, six blocks away.

No detail of the newspaper's massive move had been left to chance. The date had been picked in consultation with a meteorological firm which assured the paper that the Windy City would remain calm for the operation. In case of traffic tie-ups at the drawbridges, two big speedboats were standing by to haul light equipment across the river. The move went as smoothly as an enchainement in a Royal Ballet Swan Lake. By the time all 44 Linotypes (cost: up to $20,000 each) had been uprooted and replanted, the Sun-Times was able to boast that the titanic transfer had not delayed its press runs a single minute.

While staffers downed farewell toasts of ouzo, a high-octane Athenian absinthe dispensed by the saloon next door to the old building, Sun-Times management rolled up its sleeves for a long-awaited scrap. Restricted to 96-page press runs by inadequate mechanical facilities in the old building, ailing Marshall Field Jr.'s fast-rising Sun-Times had to turn away advertisers 14 days last year, once had to forgo 17 pages of ads. The new presses, capable of turning out 128-page papers, will also allow the Sun-Times to go all out for the added circulation it could not handle in its old building. Now the ninth biggest U.S. newspaper, the Sun-Times (circ. 588,181) boasts that it has overtaken John S. Knight's Chicago News (614,098) in ad volume, and is steadily edging up to the Chicago Tribune (943,741). "Now," vowed a Sun-Times executive, "we will go to the mat with the Trib."

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