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Coverage of the Centralia mine disaster, in which in 111 miners were killed, was typical of how the P-D works. In 1947, after the last body was pulled from the mine, scores of newsmen from other papers went home. Not the PD. It doubled its staff on the assignment, in due time established what it suspected: that the State Department of Mines was shaking down mine owners and overlooking dangerous working conditions. As a result, Illinois mine-safety laws were tightened.
On the other hand, on a fast-breaking story; the city staff can mobilize as fast as a Manhattan tabloid covering a shooting in a Park Avenue love nest. Recently the P-D got a head start on the Greenlease kidnaping, when John Kinsella, its veteran police reporter, noticed an unusual stir of activity around headquarters. He rightly guessed that the kidnapers had been found, and thus put the P-D in position to turn loose a 13-man staff on the story before any other paper had it.
O.K. Mr. Bovard. If Founder Pulitzer created the paper's vigorous spirit, it was the paper's longtime (1908-38) Managing Editor O. K. (for Oliver Kirby) Bovard who translated the spirit into a day-to-day newspaper. A whip-cracking taskmaster, he was known in the trade as a "one-man school of journalism" or the "greatest managing editor of all time." On the day he became city editor, Bovard was congratulated by one of his friends on the staff who made the mistake of addressing Bovard by his nickname, "Jack." Answered the new city editor frostily: "From now on, Harry, it's Mr. Bovard." (From that day on, he was addressed only as "Mr. Bovard.") Austere and coldly impersonal, he stood behind his staff as solidly as he expected them to stand behind their work. When a St. Louisan called to complain about a reporter's story, Bovard cut him off with: "I have never had the pleasure of meeting you. I do know [my reporter]."
Bovard always thought of the P-D first, expected his reporters to do the same. Once, a staffer covering a woman's club meeting telephoned the office and told the managing editor that the platform had collapsed, but that Mrs. Bovard, who was at the meeting, was unhurt. "Never mind that," snapped Bovard. "Have you got the story for the Post-Dispatch?" On the day he resigned, Bovard told Reporter Sam Shelton, who is now assistant to the publisher: "There are only two things I regret upon my retirement . . . One of them is the unsolved Neu murder case, and the other is [the Union Electric Co. of Missouri] across the street." The P-D never did solve the Neu murder, but two months later its exposures touched off the prosecution that sent Union Electric's president and two vice-presidents to prison for bribing public officials.