From Philadelphia, one day last week, came the announcement that the seven trustees of the estate of late, great Publisher Cyrus Curtis had sold the evening Public Ledger to a company headed by Robert Cresswell, treasurer until last month of the New York Herald Tribune.
The Public Ledger was a famed old morning paper when Curtis bought it from the late Adolph Simon Ochs (publisher of the New York Times) in 1913. He paid $2,000,000, proceeded to spend hundreds of thousands more for new equipment. To keep the Ledger presses busy he brought out an evening edition in 1914. He acquired Philadelphia’s evening Telegraph, Press, North American, merged them all with the Public Ledger. In 1924 he bought the New York evening Post. In 1930 he reputedly paid $15.000,000 for the Philadelphia Inquirer, kept it going as a competitor of the morning Ledger.
When Curtis died in 1933 his newspapers were valued at more than $50,000,000. First the never profitable New York Post was sold to David Stern, publisher of the Philadelphia Record (who still owns a minority share). The 98-year-old morning Ledger was combined in 1934 with the Inquirer, two years later was sold to a Hearstwhile circulation strong man, Moses Louis (“Moe”) Annenberg.
Last of the Curtis brood was the evening Ledger.
The Ledger’s new publisher, Robert Cresswell, is a softspoken, red-haired Philadelphia conservative. He went to work for the Herald Tribune as a reporter in 1922, has been a special writer, assistant city editor, copy reader, promotion man, circulation manager. In 1932, he became treasurer.
Cresswell’s chief financial backer reportedly is his second cousin, Cummins Catherwood, a youthful Main Line socialite and financier. Son of the late Daniel B. C. Catherwood, tea merchant, banker, yachtsman, with his mother (now dead) and sister young Catherwood inherited $15,000,000 outright in 1929, and trust funds that even in lean 1932 paid him $1445,070. His wife, no pauper, is Virginia Tucker Kent (daughter of onetime Radioman Atwater Kent).
Publisher Cresswell promptly rehired as editor Charles Munro Morrison, who was editor from 1930 to 1939. Editor Morrison, now publicity director of the Republican City Committee, is a good friend of Philadelphia’s Republican Chairman Jay Cooke. So is Publisher Cresswell, who went to school (St. Paul’s) and college (Princeton) with Chairman Cooke, served with him in World War I, later toured the world with him. The Ledger will remain a Republican paper.
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