Three for the Post

The Houston Post, with one of the biggest circulations in Texas (220,491), has of recent years quietly tended to patiently building up readership and its reputation as one of the best in the Southwest. With ailing Board Chairman and ex-Texas Governor William Pettus Hobby, 84, on the sidelines, his wife, Mrs. Oveta Culp Hobby, 58, ran things with the same crispness that she brought to her work as wartime director of the WACs and as first U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Last week the Post reached over the garden fence and, by outbidding four rivals, picked up three neighboring dailies: the morning Galveston News (circ. 17,974), the afternoon Galveston Tribune (10,668), and the afternoon Texas City Sun (6,150).

All three were once run by Entrepre neur William L. Moody Jr., who before his death in 1954 had built up a $400 million empire in banking, insurance, real estate, cotton, oil, hotels and ranching. "My father told me never to dispose of these papers,'' said Mrs. Mary Moody Northen, but in a bitter, two-hour meeting, stockholders overrode her. Mrs. Hobby's winning bid was kept secret, and the philanthropic Moody Foundation, which supervised the transaction, would go no farther than to say that the underbidders did not include the Scripps-Howard or Newhouse chains. Said Mrs. Northen: "This has broken my heart."

The Hobbys hastened to assure her that the papers would operate as they have in the past, as "distinct public serv ants." And though the purchase gave the Houston Post Company a commanding position in East Texas, crew-cut Post Managing Editor William P. Hobby Jr., 30, Oveta's boy, was quick to hush speculation that it was out for more. "Much as I like the sound of the phrase," said he, "this is not the start of an empire."

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