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"When I reminded Mussolini of our Cannes meeting he laughed, put his arm around my shoulder and said: 'Times have changed.' He speaks English rather well now. . . ."
The U. S. journalist was Webb Miller of United Press, famed for his candid coverage of Gandhite salt riots and police beatings in India (TIME, June 2).
Sold: $132,000
When two great & good friends of Mayor William Hale Thompson were named receivers for the moribund Chicago Evening Post some weeks ago, it was popularly presumed that the Post would become a Thompson-yawper (TIME, Feb. 16). Put up at public auction last week, the Post became no such thing. It was bought for $132,000 by youthful, personable, go-getting Knowlton Lyman Ames Jr., publisher of the Chicago Journal of Commerce. Only other bidder was Hearst's Evening American.
The Journal of Commerce was to be moved into the Post building on West Wacker Drive, but there was to be no merger of the papers. Publisher Ames planned to continue the Post (which for 30 years had lost money for Chain-publisher John Charles Shaffer), as a clean conservative daily with perhaps more emphasis than before on financial news. Its 48.000 circulation is trifling compared to the others in the evening field—Hearst's Evening American (530,000), Walter A. Strong's News (422,000), even the infant tabloid Illustrated Times (153,000). But it is almost wholly "class."
About ten years ago the Journal of Commerce was acquired by young Ames' father, a second cousin of Ambassador Charles Gates Dawes, a utility tycoon and president of Booth Fisheries Co. To college men of the Golden Nineties, short, wiry Ames Sr. will always be known as "Snake" Ames, for the way he would slither, eel-hipped, through whole Yale football teams for dear old Princeton. Young Knowlton, 37, tall and rangy, is sometimes called "Snake" by his father's friends, but more often "Junior." He too played football at Princeton ('17) but did not star; he did shine at baseball. A second son, John Dawes Ames, 27, associated with "Junior" in the Journal of Commerce and Post, was a Princeton golf captain.
A terrifically hard worker, Ames Jr. has been almost entirely responsible for the success of the Journal of Commerce, of which he was made president last October. Without previous publishing experience, he applied himself rigorously, for years rejected practically all social invitations to spend his evenings at the office, seeing his paper to bed.