Folksiness on Wall Street

Vermont Connecticut Royster joined the Wall Street Journal rather casually. Fresh from college in 1936, he had been fired from a New York City news service and turned down by almost every paper in town. About to call it quits, he noticed the Journal on a newsstand. "Well, that's one I haven't tried," he thought. He was hired on a temporary basis, and claims that he still is a temporary fillin, though now he happens to be editor. Occasionally he asks Publisher Barney Kilgore: "When am I going to be permanent?" Kilgore puts him off: "Do you think you've adjusted yet?"

Royster, 51, is still as casual as ever about the Journal, and that is half the secret of the paper's success. On the editorial page, Royster makes high finance and big business friendly and folksy. He reduces economic intricacies to homilies anyone can understand. He takes the mystery out of Wall Street and makes it seem almost a neighborly kind of place. He is capable of acute, even eloquent analysis, but in his column, he compares Lyndon Johnson to Tom Sawyer's speechifying Uncle Silas, U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry to Carrie Nation, the fellow who picked his pocket on the subway to the tax-and-spend Federal Government. A week and a half ago, he was elected president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, a job where folksiness and friendliness pay off.

National Names. Royster is a North Carolina boy who was shrewd enough not to shed all his country ways in the big city. He still has a fetching Southern drawl, a dry wit that takes people by surprise, and a name that stands out even in New York. Vermont's great-granddaddy, a practical man, decided to name his children after states in order to tell them apart. Along came Iowa Michigan Royster, Wisconsin Illinois, Arkansas Delaware, Virginia Carolina, Georgia Alabama, Nathaniel Confederate States. No hard feelings about Yankees; one boy was named Vermont Connecticut, and the name was passed on. "I've been trying all my life to get people to call me Vermont," says the present Vermont. But they don't. They call him Roy or Bunny.

Raised in Raleigh, Royster went to prep school in Bell Buckle, Tenn., then to the University of North Carolina, where he reported for the Daily Tar Heel and made Phi Beta Kappa. "He was as busy as the bumblebee he resembled," a friend recalls. A few months after he joined the Journal, he went to Washington, where he covered the Treasury, Capitol Hill, the White House. As a sign of his new national outlook, he and his wife Frances did not name their two daughters for states; they are called Bonnie and Eleanor.

Spinning the Wheels. In 1941, Royster was commissioned in the Navy, served in the Atlantic and the South' Pacific, where baffled brass mistook his name for some kind of code. At war's end, he became the Journal's Washington bureau chief, later moved to New York to write editorials for which he won a 1953 Pulitzer Prize for "warmth, simplicity and understanding of the basic outlook of the American people." He was named editor in 1958 and put in charge of the editorial page. Though he still sets policy, he writes few editorials nowadays. Instead, he concentrates on his column "Thinking Things Over," which he writes when the mood strikes him. "An editorial is a formal presentation," he says. "In my column, I can spin my wheels a little. I try to sound like a neighbor talking."

He is a fairly conservative neighbor. Sometimes he sounds downright peevish; the Federal Government, as he sees it, can do little that's right, at least in the economic field. Other times, he makes a strong case for his brand of individualism: "Nothing is so corrupting to a man as to believe it is his duty to save mankind from men. He comes to evil because he must first usurp the rights of men and finally the prerogatives of God." And occasionally he sounds a warning note worth heeding amid the euphoria of the Great Society. "I believe that once you let someone decide what's good for you, you've got to accept it," he declares. "The ultimate end of this sort of surrender is totalitarianism."

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