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Last week another man marched up from Philadelphia to Manhattan to become the Post's new owner and publisher. Julius David Stern was a practical journalist in his shirtsleeves who had made a success of his blatant Philadelphia Record. To his 700 new employes Postman Stern told how he got the paper, where it would stand:
"It was the most dramatic thing in my career. When I called Mr. Martin he had sitting by his desk a lawyer representing the other evening newspapers in New York City. He had a certified check [for $250,000] from these newspapers on his desk and in his pocket he had a statement of discontinuance.* . . . I almost waited too long. . . .
''The newspaper will be independent politically like the rest of my papers. I support President Roosevelt because he is a great Liberal not because he is a Democrat. LaGuardia is another great Liberal. . . . I am behind General Johnson and the NRA . . . controlled credit inflation. I want to run a newspaperman's newspaper."
The antithesis of his immediate predecessors on the Post, Publisher Stern at least shares with its oldtime Editors Edwin Lawrence Godkin and Oswald Garrison Villard, a ready liberalism and an ink-stained knowledge of how to run a newspaper. A young Philadelphian out of the University of Pennsylvania, he bought the New Brunswick (N. J.) Times for $1,500 in 1911, when he was 25. With it, he promptly began a lively campaign to clean up the municipal government. When he sold the Times to political adversaries he got $25,000. He and his wife bought a car, drove to Springfield, Ill., bought two more papers which Publisher Stern sold four years later for a fat profit. In 1919 he took over the Camden, N. J. Evening Courier, and, later, the Camden Morning Post. He spent $500,000, ousted U. S. Senator David Baird's machine, installed a City Commission, ran up the Courier's circulation from 9,000 to 80,000, won his campaign for a bridge across the Delaware River. Across that bridge five years ago Publisher Stern marched into Philadelphia and bought the down-at-heel little Record. Since 1928 Publisher Stern and his able Editor Harry Saylor have built the Record's daily circulation from 100,000 to 150,000, doubled its Sunday circulation.
Publisher Stern likes best his papers' editorial page, which he usually writes himself. His lively political philippics helped to smash Philadelphia's Boss William Scott Vare last month. In Philadelphia where there is no Hearst and where the stodgy Bulletin has been a model for the city's other journals, the Record got attention by rowdy headlines, pictures of chorus girls, comic strips, proletarian social-advice columns, interlarded with intelligent liberalism.
Stocky, genial, accustomed to bustling about his city room in his shirt sleeves, Publisher Stern lives in a square colonial house at East Haddonfield, N. J. with his wife, whom he married when she was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, and their four children. He smokes long black cigars, drives his car recklessly, plans to commute to Manhattan by plane. His office at the Record has a kitchenette where his butler makes his lunch on busy days.