Press: Visitors Unwelcome

Last week, as advertised, the Providence Star-Tribune came up for sale. Providence newspapermen expected it to go to Julius David Stern, publisher of the New York Post and Philadelphia Record who was interested in the Star-Tribune because he had once been general manager of its forerunner, the Providence News.

Instead it developed that Stephen O. Metcalf, president of the Providence Journal and Bulletin, anxious to keep outsiders out, had apparently been secretly preparing extra men on the Journal to take the place of the Star-Tribune staff overnight. Overnight, Mr. Metcalf stepped in last week to buy the Star-Tribune on the high bid of $181,000 cash, plus satisfaction of a $121,875 mortgage held by one-time owner U. S. Senator Peter G. Gerry. Completely out of the transaction was Walter Edmund O’Hara, who ran the Star-Tribune into bankruptcy after Governor Robert Quinn, his political nemesis, had clamped shut Mr. O’Hara’s profitable Narragansett Park race track.

Now boss of all three Providence dailies, Stephen Metcalf last week sent Journal-trained journalists to run the Star-Tribune until “adequately financed, independent operation of the Star-Tribune can be arranged, through reputable Rhode Island ownership of whatever political complexion. . . .” Then the Journal will sell out.