The Press: Peppo, Zippo & Zoomo

It was just 13 years ago that the fatcat Republican Los Angeles Times moved into a handsome new six-story building. To protect the inlaid city-room floor, reporters were forbidden to smoke. Last week, directly behind this modern plant, another building was nearing completion —a ten-story white shaft with sea-green windows and an affluent look. Times reporters, who long ago broke down the no-smoking rule, were under fresh orders from the management: anybody who entered the new building would be fired on the spot.

The mysterious annex housed huge new presses, a topnotch photo lab, a complete city room—facilities to turn out another paper as big as the morning Times itself (circ. 400,000 daily, 800,000 Sunday). Publisher Norman Chandler had just appointed 40-year-old U.P. Vice President Virgil Pinkley, a Southern Californian with both editorial and business experience, as his “executive assistant.” He had also purchased a new paper mill. And within a month, the Times had signed on 25 new staffers, was quietly organizing them into reporter-photographer teams. Stringbean-shaped U.P. man Phil Ault, who had worked with Pinkley in London and North Africa, had started pounding a Times police beat—traditional prep school for prospective city editors in a strange town.

No one at the Times was talking, but almost everyone else in town was. The rumor: that the Times was about to start a new afternoon paper (Los Angeles has three A.M.s but only one P.M.).

If the rumors were right, Pinkley looked like a good man for the new paper’s top job. As U.P.’s vice president and European general manager, Pinkley averaged 200,000 miles a year, acquired a travel agent’s memory for train and plane schedules. He also developed a fondness for playing with words, congratulating U.P. staffers for stories with plenty of “zoomo,” “zippo” and “peppo.” What did he think about the zoomo annex, its zippo presses and the prospects of a peppo afternoon paper? Said Pinkley blandly last week: “It’s a highly rentable office building, you know.”