The biggest newspaper in New Hampshire is neither very big nor very famous. But newsmen know the Manchester evening Leader (circ. 20,000) and its morning-after edition, the Union (25,000), as the springboard from which the late Frank Knox bounded to the big time and the Chicago Daily News. Prim and profitable, the Leader has never bothered to put out a Sunday paper, has been content to let Boston dailies grab off most of the morning circulation in town (pop. 80,000).
Since Knox died in 1944, New Englanders have swapped many a rumor about his papers: Hearst was dickering for them; the Gannett chain was knocking at the door; Scripps-Howard would move in. Last week tanned, boyish-faced William Loeb, 41, crusading publisher of two small Vermont dailies, had taken-over in Manchester—and to help swing the $1,250,000 deal (he had put up only $250,000 of his own) had invited in a trio of shrewd news tycoons that New Hampshire had hardly heard of: the Ridder Bros., of New York and points west, whose favorite reading matter is not headlines but balance sheets.
Outpost of Empire. Victor, Joseph (his twin) and Bernard Ridder thereby added a new outpost to a little-known, $15,000,000 empire that already stretched from coast to coast. Its founder was astute Herman Ridder, who started the Catholic News 60 years ago, bought Manhattan's Staats-Zeitung in 1890 and died in 1915, leaving to his sons the delicate job of steering a German-language paper through the storms of anti-German feeling in World War I.
By offering their paper to President Wilson and George Creel for the U.S. cause, the Ridders rode out the war, while five of their seven German-language competitors folded. But they were convinced that there was no future in the foreign-language press, since most immigrants wanted to learn English. In 1926 the Ridders bought the New York Journal of Commerce and the feeble (circ. 12,000) Long Island Daily Press in Jamaica.
In Jamaica, to build circulation, the Ridders went out for society news, overruling the local editor, who insisted that there was no society in Jamaica. They had a hard time finding out who was giving parties until they hit upon the idea of paying ice-cream vendors to tip them off every time a housewife ordered more than two quarts. The paper had seven times the circulation they started with.
Westward Ho. Thus encouraged, the brothers branched out: to St. Paul (the Pioneer Press and Dispatch), to Duluth (the News-Tribune and Herald), the Dakotas (Aberdeen and Grand Forks) and the West Coast. They own 49% of the prosperous Seattle Times, and for one year ran the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Ridders' Staats-Zeitung, after one false start, was steadfastly anti-Hitler. (Bernard Ridder, home from a 1933 trip to Berlin, sized up Hitler as "a man of peace.") Long before World War II, the Ridder papers went interventionist, which hurt them in the isolationist Midwest.
Today ruddy-faced, blue-eyed Joseph Ridder, 60, runs the family's Ridder Publications, Inc. from a paneled office in the old World building, on Manhattan's Park Row. Victor, his invalid twin, divides his time between Duluth and New York. Bernard, a retired poet, runs the St. Paul papers, and eight Ridder sons, back from the war, are spotted at strategic points of the empire.