Swasey to the Coast

With evident pleasure an important Hearstling last week prepared to give up a big Hearst job. Short, white-wooled Edgar Marshall Swasey resigned as publisher of the New York Evening Journal, largest Hearstpaper, to-- go back to his former work as western advertising representative of Hearst's American Weekly. Gaily he planned to drive home to California this week in a brand new 16-cylinder Cadillac. He had never driven across the continent, able to stop where he wanted, look twice at what he saw. Friends wanted to give him a send-off banquet but he, though he loves good food and good friends, demurred. He did not want "to sit around and hear a lot of goddam flattery. Because. I'm not goin', I'm comin'!" Onetime associate of Adman Barron Collier, Publisher Swasey joined the Hearst organization on New Year's Day 1919 by taking charge (at no salary) of the' Los Angeles Examiner which was then suffering a boycott by department store advertisers. Aware that the boycott could not be broken for at least a year, he filled the paper with specialty shop advertising, made the Examiner a moneymaker. Three years later Publisher Hearst sent Adman Swasey to be publisher of the New York American, but he was unable to show great profits for that never-prosperous paper. In 1925 he became vice president of American Weekly but could not get along with President Albert John Kobler (now publisher of the Manhattan tabloid Mirror). To settle the quarrel Publisher Hearst transferred Adman Swasey back to California, gave him the enormously lucrative representation of the American Weekly there. When Hearst asked him in 1929 to go East again to take hold of the Journal, Adman Swasey went reluctantly. During his administration the Journal made circulation gains for 27 consecutive months. With the exception of the World-Telegram, whose advertising naturally soared on the World merger, the Journal was the only Manhattan evening paper to gain advertising last year. Chief among Publisher Swasey's expressed reasons for asking to be returned to the Pacific Coast was California homesickness, aggravated by high cost of living in Manhattan.

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