Oil derricks weathered under the south western sun; tramp steamers rusted in their harbor slips. But the visitor from New York heeded neither the heat nor the scenery. Samuel I. Newhouse, 67, had come to the Texas Gulf Coast port of Beaumont for only one reason — to run down a rumor that the city's two news papers were for sale. Beyond that possibility, Beaumont held no charms for the little man from the big city. And when the rumor proved false, the visitor could not get out of town fast enough.
But Sam Newhouse's unopened check book smoldered in his briefcase. Buying newspapers is not only his chief pleasure; it is the purpose of his life. Surely there must be a paper for sale somewhere in the vicinity. On impulse, Sam headed for Houston. There he goggled at the sights: sleek Cadillacs schooling in the streets, glittering shops, new buildings all over the city, and more new buildings rising on nearly every block. A heady boomtown flavor hung in the humid air. Without pausing even to examine a copy of the Post, Hous ton's leading daily, Newhouse sought out its co-proprietor, Mrs. Oveta Gulp Hobby, and put in a magnificently reckless bid. Would she sell him the paper for, say, $40 million cash? No, said Mrs. Hobby politely, she would not.
Disappointed a second time, Sam Newhouse telephoned Newspaper Broker Allen Kander in Washington, D.C. He was down South. Where could he buy a newspaper? Try New Orleans, Kander suggested. Newhouse did. And just two weeks after that long-distance phone call, U.S. journalism's smallest publisher (5 ft. 3 in., 136 Ibs.) closed the biggest deal in U.S. journalistic history. For $42 million—more than three times what the Louisiana Territory cost the U.S. in 1803—Newhouse bought both of New Orleans' papers: the morning Times-Picayune (circ. 195,151 daily, 307,-983 Sunday) and its evening companion, the States-Item (163,650).*
The Louisiana purchase not only set a record but hoisted Sam Newhouse to the top of the heap. With 19 dailies having a combined daily and Sunday circulation of 5,700,000, he now owns, in whole or part, more newspapers than anyone else in the U.S.; he has one more than the Scripps-Howard chain, eight more than the shriveled empire governed by the descendants of William Randolph Hearst (although the circulation of Scripps-Howard and Hearst each exceeds that of the Newhouse papers). Nor does Newhouse's ascendancy end there. Scripps-Howard, Hearst, and the whole U.S. newspaper field are contracting. Newhouse is still growing—at such an exponential rate that the price he paid for New Orleans is almost one-third the cost of all his other properties combined. Among the country's newspaper giants, Sam Newhouse seems to know best how to make daily newspapering pay.
"You Run It." He has successfully made money out of newspapers for 40 years. Beginning with the $49,000 he invested in 1922 for a slice of the tiny, money-losing Staten Island Advance, he has spent some $122 million collecting properties that now include not only his newspapers but three radio stations, six TV stations and two magazine publishing firms, a 66% interest in Conde Nast and Street & Smith. By conservative estimate, these possessions are worth $250 million today. They produce a handsome annual gross in excess of $125 million.
This solid-gold pyramid was erected by a man who