Word: p-d
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...legend, as well as with the lively afternoon opposition (the Star-Times). The legend was the enormous reputation of his predecessor, lofty, autocratic Oliver Kirby ("O.K.") Bovard, one of the great managing editors of his time. What made matters worse was that Bovard, before he stalked out of the P-D (at the end of a long disagreement with Publisher Joseph Pulitzer), had made it clear that he thought City Editor Ben Reese something less than a worthy successor...
...staff felt they were getting a police court managing editor," he later admitted.) But Reese was a bedrock newsman, who had started out at $8 a week on the Chief in home-town Hobart, Mo., worked on a handful of other papers before he joined the P-D in 1913. He was smart enough to capitalize on talents far different from Bovard...
Wield the Lash. As P-D city editor for 25 years, big (6 ft. 4 in., 240 Ibs.) Ben Reese had built up a crack staff by painstaking direction and a relentless, daily wielding of the lash on staffers who failed to give him what he wanted ("Tell him the Post-Dispatch wants to know, and don't come back without the story"). He had developed many a bannerline expose through his dogged, relentless pursuit of the smallest story clue, spent as much as $50,000 to break a hot story. In 1936, for example, by sending a dozen...
...Pulitzer Prize himself for his 1932 series on "The Country's Plight-What can be done about it?"-a scholarly, thoughtful and fair-minded examination of the Depression and the remedies the Hoover administration was applying. In 1934, Ross went back to St. Louis to boss the P-D's editorial page. But he was too good a reporter to be a brilliant editorial writer; his editorials were long on balance and facts, short on opinion. In 1939 he was back in Washington again as contributing editor of the PD, covering the political scene...
...Nonentity. When Harry Truman became President, Ross wrote for the P-D a cool, detached judgment of his old friend: "He has been called an average American, but he is better than average. He is not a nonentity and no Harding. He may not have the makings of a great President, but he has the makings of a good President." One of the first things President Truman did was to persuade Ross to give up his $35,000-a-year job with the P-D and become press secretary at $10,000 (later raised...