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Hoiles's papers "don't seem too bad," said one ex-staffer, "just so long as you don't read the editorials." Their layout is usually clean, if undistinguished, and they play most stories straight. Stories concerning the old man's pet hates—municipal bond issues, school board elections, federal spending programs—are given top prominence. Reflecting his stern morals, some of the papers make a point of listing all people who are involved in divorce suits—even when their names are not at all newsworthy. Traffic violators are also invariably identified, and when Hoiles himself was nailed for speeding in the Rio Grande Valley, his papers front-paged the story. In any case, the formula seems to pay: his papers are first in circulation even where there is competition.
According to Hoiles. Nursing dollars is a lesson Publisher Hoiles learned early. He squirreled away his first two months' pay as a teen-aged Ohio farm hand, and bought a $13 gold watch that he still carries. After graduating from Mount Union (Ohio) Methodist College, he went to work for the Alliance Review as a $2-a-week printer's assistant; after 17 years he was manager with an annual salary of $10,000. He bought the Bucyrus Telegraph Forum in 1935, soon was able to ante up $750,000 for the Santa Ana Register, where he still has a shabby headquarters suite. Only six weeks ago he went after three Texas dailies, but Mrs. Oveta Culp Hobby's Houston Post outbid him by $750,000 (TIME, March 1).
Alongside his scattershot editorials, he prints just about any columnist who sees things according to Hoiles. Through the years he has given space to such professional anti-Semites as Gerald L. K. Smith, the late Upton Close and Joseph P. Kamp —and to one David Baxter, who often rails against the evils of "Romanism."
Libertarian Arts. To guard against backsliders on the staff of any of his papers, Hoiles periodically sends his top men off to his "Freedom School" in Colorado Springs for a reindoctrination course at the hands of a battery of right-thinking instructors. Founded with Hoiles's cash in 1956, the Freedom School is run by a glib, grey-haired ex-real estate agent and radio announcer named Robert LeFevre, who also edits the Colorado Springs paper. Long associated with far-right causes, LeFevre was the moving force in an oddball outfit called the Falcon Lair Foundation that was spawned in the late 1940s and proposed to avert World War III by three prayer sessions a day—one at 7:30 a.m., one at noon and one at 7 p.m.
Next month LeFevre and the Freedom School will play host to a batch of businessmen at a two-week session to examine how "the company whose top executives are positively oriented to profits and are thoroughly grounded in free market principles can weather the socialist storms besetting our economy." Itself quite positively oriented to profits, the school charges $350 a head, plus $175 for wives. Under LeFevre's guidance, besieged Rampart College promises more of the same, but stretched out in a sort of four-year libertarian arts program.