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Editrix Hersey is the divorced wife of one Harold Hersey who formerly edited magazines for Bernarr Macfadden. She is gentle-mannered, motherly, with grey bobbed hair, a member of the D. A. R. and Order of the Eastern Star. Daughter of a Methodist minister (there are 25 Methodist ministers, mostly missionaries, in her family), she was graduated from Willamette, a Methodist university in Oregon. At various times she worked in Washington as secretary to onetime Congressman George E. Foss of Illinois; in the Bureau of Education; in the horticultural board of the Department of Agriculture; as a researcher in the State Department. Following a few sporadic efforts at magazine writing and editing she joined the Donenfelds in 1929. Her 18-year-old daughter, she says, is an avid reader of La Paree, et al. "It is the most interesting form of journalism," believes Editrix Hersey. "It gets you so close to people. They write in and tell us we help them escape inhibitions."
Editrix Hersey announces revival of the Police Gazette in September as a fortnightly. It will be printed in rotogravure with the old masthead. There will be a comic strip narrating the life of a chorus girl named "Flossie Flip" and a Broadway colyum. Besides sport news, it will contain, in Editrix Hersey's carefully chosen words: "Lots of sex, underworld stuff with a sex angle, and plenty of pictures of semi-nude nightclub girls."
Anti-Long Merger
A marvelous thing is the crawfish. He revels in mud and in slime. He wallows in gutters, this raw fish, And has a most wonderful time. . . .
With editorials, cartoons and jingles (such as above) the New Orleans States fought the rule of Huey Pierce ("King-fish") Long in Louisiana for the past five years. The wily Kingfish did not take this sort of thing lying down. He won over the Item and Tribune, whose Publisher James Mcllhany Thomson (son-in-law of the late great Champ Clark) had formerly opposed him. by giving the Thomson papers all State advertising, by forcing State employes to subscribe.
There was no grief in the heart of Senator Long last week when the 53-year-old States (circulation 38,000) ceased to be an independent newspaper. The Times-Picayune bought its name, circulation, A. P., Universal, N. E. A. and King Features franchises for $525,000 cash.
On the eve of the sale, John Dunbrack Ewing, trustee and operator since 1931 of his late father's paper, called the States staff together. A note of bitterness found its way into his farewell address when he recalled that "Huey Long by threats and terrorism had blocked efforts to refinance after the bank troubles this spring, when the States was caught in the Canal Bank & Trust Co. [TIME, April 3]." He was happy to say that the Times-Picayune, "the South's oldest and richest newspaper" and no friend to Huey Long, would retain the States' senior staff members, including Editor J. Walker Ross who has served the paper for 48 years. The Times-Picayune is a morning paper. The States continues in the evening field, merging its Sunday edition with that of its purchaser with the result that the Times-Picayune will have 20 pages of Sunday comics.