Maverick's Rise

In 1953, after a two-year rise from copyboy to overnight editor of Chicago's hardboiled, fast-moving City News Bureau,* brash, blond Bruce Sagan (rhymes with pagan) paid $2,500 for a withered weekly called the Hyde Park Herald. Breathing life into the body and new fire into the Southside community. Publisher Sagant mounted a hard-hitting campaign for slum clearance, coupled picture spreads of slum dwellings (including owners' names) with authoritative how-to-do-it articles on redevelopment. Outcome: Hyde Park qualified for federal aid as the Midwest's first and biggest project of this type approved under the new Eisenhower urban-renewal program.

A Pox on the Palace. Training his slingshot on the Democratic machine, Wonderboy Sagan at 26 helped elect Independent State Representative Abner Mikva, who was voted "outstanding freshman" of 1957 by the Illinois legislature. Taking on the Chicago Theological Seminary, the Herald last year leaped into the fight that saved Architect Frank Lloyd Wright's famed Robie House from demolition to make way for a dormitory. As circulation hit 8,500--350% more than the old Herald--Publisher Sagan was able to say: "The paper is worth ten times what we paid for it."

Last week New Jersey-born Bruce Sagan, now a ripe 29, broadened his reach by putting up more than $1,000,000 to buy the 52-year-old Economist, a bustling biweekly whose Southtown and Southeast editions blanket 22% of metropolitan Chicago--including the Lake Calumet area, where Chicago is building a vast new industrial complex on the St. Lawrence Seaway. The ad-fat Economist (circ. 152,000), which has more, than 100 staffers, also has a battling tradition. Example: crying "land steal," it has vociferously fought grandiose plans for a convention palace on the lake front, as decreed long ago by the late Colonel Bertie McCormick and still pushed by the Tribune.

Bread & Butter. A self-styled maverick who dropped out of the University of Chicago Law School "because I didn't like it," Bruce Sagan is the youngest of three sons of a wealthy Manhattan garment manufacturer--and thus, in the eyes of his critics, has gone from riches to a rag. Even with help from his family, Sagan's success has been powered by a broad streak of pugnacity and a keen nose for news. Says his old City News boss, Managing Editor Isaac Gershman: "He moves three times faster than anyone else."

What makes Sagan sprint is the realization that metropolitan dailies today are leaving an ever-widening void for small neighborhood papers to fill (TIME, Dec. 2). In no city in the U.S. is this more true than in sprawling Chicago, whose press is frequently apathetic to corruption. Says Press Baronet Sagan: "A neighborhood paper has the local, personal function, the bread-and-butter job, of telling who married whom--and you'd be surprised how many people care. The second function is concern for civic affairs. A city is a terribly complicated animal. It's even harder for people to know what's going on in their own city than to find out what Khrushchev is doing. This is a function that dailies are no longer filling."

* Among other C.N.B. alumni: Walter Howey, model for the managing editor in The Front Page, the play's co-author Charlie MacArthur, and Hildy Johnson, the real-life reporter who was its hero. * No kin to Novelist Francoise Sagan, whose real name is Quoirez.

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