Ear on Chicago; Hit the Street: Chicago Sun-Times Circulation Department

This is the story of the circulation department of the Chicago Sun Times. In order to tell the story, we will process a new subscription. Our story opens in front of the home of a potential new subscriber. We are now standing just outside the residence of Mr. Herb Grayson at 5212 West Lake. Larry McGregor, one of the delivery boys for the Chicago Sun Times, is standing right next to me. And Larry is going to try and sell Mr. Grayson a subscription to the paper. He is trying to get the subscription to help earn a train for Christmas. The Sun Times is having a circulation drive on right now, and the train will be given to Larry if he gets five subscriptions. Now Mr. Grayson is an old friend of Larry's family because they lived in the neighborhood a long time. So, let's listen in as Larry approaches the door and we'll talk to Mr. Grayson. Hello, Larry. What can I do for you this morning?

Well, Mr. Grayson, I wanted to help me out, and I wanted this electric train from the Sun Times. I need five subscriptions, and I wish it'd be the first one to take it for me. Well, how much would the Sun Times cost me? Well, I think it'd be about $2 ,025, but you only have to pay once a month. Okay, well, I'd like to have the paper start tomorrow morning if I take it. Well, I suppose I could get a special order sometime, maybe I'll have to see my boss about that. All right, would you let me know? Sure, I'll try. Would you sign the subscription blank here for me? All right. Well, Mr. Grayson is now signing the subscription blank, and Larry has himself a subscription toward earning that train set for Christmas. Larry lets you and I walk outside, as Mr. Grayson is going to have his breakfast and get it on his way to work. Just outside the

home of Mr. Grayson now, I want to talk to Larry just briefly for a moment. Larry, you have a subscription here towards earning that train set for Christmas, and as I said earlier, this Mr. Grayson is an old friend of your family, and it didn't take much of a sales pitch to get him. No, it didn't. Well, now, Larry, what will you do with this subscription blank? Actually, what we're going to do for purposes of the program is to take it down to the circulation department of the sun times ourselves, and then we'll meet you tomorrow morning when you get ready to deliver the paper. But normally, what do you do? I'll take it back to the agency and give it to my boss. He probably mails it in. Yeah, that's right. Okay, thank you very much, Larry, and we'll see you tomorrow morning, right? All right. How early will it be when we get there? Oh, five o 'clock, maybe. All right. We'll see you there. We are now in the office of Mr. Lou Spear, who is the circulation manager for the Chicago sun times. Mr. Spear, in order to tell the story of the circulation department, we have a subscription here, which was taken just a short while ago by one of your delivery

boys, boy by the name of Larry McGrale. This subscription is for Mr. Herb Grayson at 5212 West Lake Street here in Chicago. He wants a special delivery on this. He'd like to have it by tomorrow morning. Now the reason we're in your office is to find out what happens to this subscription. Well, normally, it would take a few days to process it, but if you would like to have it delivered tomorrow morning, we would of course have to take it to the home delivery department, to the man who's in charge of the subscription department there, Mr. Dan Olegna. And if you'd like to, I'd take these right outside my office and start the thing off. All right, fine. Let's go out there. But before we go, I'd like to ask you just one or two questions about subscription drives. Now, this particular one, this boy, Larry McGrale, as I understand it, is trying to get himself a train set. That's correct. Align or electric train? How often do you have these circulation drives? Well, sometimes once a year, sometimes once in two years. Is this one of your major drives, the one where you

give away a train set? It is this year, yes. Just before Christmas or at least not very far off. That's the purpose of the drive, yes. All right. We'll talk to you more about circulation drives and why you have them a little later on in the program. But right now, we better get into the home circulation department and carry it through with our subscription blank. Just across the hall from Mr. Spears' office is the office of Dan Olegna, assistant home delivery manager. Dan, we have a subscription here for Mr. Herb Grayson. I know that you probably don't do this too often, but he's asked for a special delivery. He wants it tomorrow morning. Well, we should do everything possible to see that this paper is delivered tomorrow morning. Well, now this involves some paperwork right here, I suppose. So as I bring this into here, what do you do with it? Well, we type a order out and send it out to our dealer. But in this case, we will call the dealer this afternoon and make him a word of fact that a subscription is coming out on the train so that he could deliver that paper

special for tomorrow morning. We usually take from two to three days normally. Now what is the paperwork that's involved? How much? What do you do with it? Well, we have our girls. They get the name and address of it. We have to route it to the particular district that it's supposed to go to. It's then typed on a hard card and sent to the dealer. Also, at the same time, after a week or so, we have our district supervisors check to see if the order is authentic. Well, then the next thing that happens really is for the delivery of the paper. And I suppose for us to start that story, we better get down to the press room where they're pulling the papers off the press, right? Yes, sir. Thank you very much, Dan, for talking to us. You're welcome. We have now come to the press room where, after all, the business end of this operation occurs. We've got to ask subscription of Mr. Grayson's process through the paperwork. And here is where the paper will be coming off the presses any moment now because the presses are just about ready to start up. It's very early in the morning, the following morning, after

the subscription order was taken. Mr. Spira, I know it's time for the presses to begin operation and you and I won't be able to talk very much longer about this particular press room. But I'd like to talk to somebody in here about the operation of this department. Jimmy Shannon is here. Jimmy! Jimmy, could you come over a minute, Jim? Jim Shannon's assistant farmman of the press room here, Mr. Hill. I know you're about ready to roll here, Jim, and we will take up much of your time. But I'd like to ask you just a couple of questions about the operation of the department. First of all, how many presses here do you have? Well, we have one six unit press right here and the QC right here. Is this the only press in the building? No, we have about 36 units all together. How many papers can you print here in say an hour? Well, we can put out about 36 ,000 per hour. 36 ,000? That's right. Is this your counter over here that I'm looking at that dial? That's our counter. That's right. That's right. That's the rate of the press. Every once in a while, Jim, as the papers come off the line down here at the end

of the press, I see a paper turned crossway. Is that a counter there, too? That's an indicator of a 50. That's 50 papers. That's right. Every time you see that, that means 50 more. 50 papers. That's right. Well, it's certainly an interesting operation down here, Jim. And as I said, they're about ready to start up these presses. In fact, the buttons are going to be pushed right now. Let's record that, then we'll have to get out of the room. There go the lights. What do the lights mean? Oh, clear. It's safe in there. It's safe now. It's safe in on night. Yeah. It's called for electrician on that? Yeah, well. I mean, it's safe to roll, is that right? That's right. All right, then the lights work, and so it's safe to roll the presses. All right, down here. I always have to try this. Oh, they have to. Starts up slowly, but it'll be going full force here in a minute. Actually, the papers are rolling through now at what you would call slow motion. And in just a minute, you won't be able to hear my voice any longer.

Sometimes, they're rolling off now very slowly, starting to pick up speed. You'll be able to hear the acceleration now. Jimmy, as long as I have a chance here, thanks a minute for talking to us. Here's your welcome. The magazine time. Right. It's now reached 24 ,000 sheets. 24 ,000 papers per hour. I don't know if you've been hearing any longer. In a minute, it'll be up to around 36 ,000 per hour. While we're going to have to move out of the room, we're going to the mail room now in top two of the mail department.

We've come out of the mail room, which is just a few doors away, a few steps away from the press room, and amazingly enough, you can just barely hear the presses from in here. However, there are other machines in here, which are now in operation, and counting out these papers. A number of men working here stacking up the Chicago Sun Times, ready for delivery. Mr. Spear, I'd like to talk to somebody in here about the operation of the mail room. Mr. Harry Wayne is our mail room superintendent and Harry is here now. Mr. Hale, listen, Harry Wayne. Hello, Harry, how are you? Harry, what about this conveyor belt right here? This comes in from the press room, does it not? These papers come from the press room, and they have a kicker in there, that indicates there's 50 papers in each turn. That kicker, by the way, is the thing I think we were talking about in there in the press room, the paper that comes out crossways, and it's correct, sir, and the mailers will fly their papers to that 50. Now, you talk about the mailers. Is this a mailer right here

in front of us? Yes, sir. Remember the mailers here? They take these papers off the presses. All right, conveyor belt here, after it comes off the presses, it's high overhead, and then drops down right in front of us, and runs along a belt all about 10 feet in a horizontal fashion here, and then right at the end of it, they pick off 50 and stack them over there on another table. And then in turn goes to our series of rollers, which is actually another conveyor belt. How many stacks, how much is in each stack over there? There's a hundred papers in each bundle today, and we usually run them 15 of them on a larger paper. Now, once they go off the end of that roller conveyor belt, what happens to them after that? I see another conveyor belt over there. Well, first, he goes through the tying machine, Eric. Through the tying machine, and goes through the other conveyor, and is directed directly to the trucks. Tying machine. All right, I think that's about all 15 or 20 feet away from us. Let's go down and take a look at that. All right, sir. Harry, here we are at the tying machine, or

the tying machine, as you call it. The bundles of 100 sun times coming off the roller conveyor belt. Here's a man here, just about ready to move them all over into this machine. Now, how does that work? Well, this machine is an automatic tie machine. You get about 22 bundles per minute on this particular machine. Now, by tie machine, Harry means that the bundles are tied up by wire. There's only one wire really, isn't there, going around the middle section of the paper? Yes, that's true, but this is an automatic machine. It's wired and tight. As you see it here now. And then the bundle of papers rolls off into another conveyor belt. And that's really, it looks like a belt from here is a belt or roller's over there. After it is bundled and tied, there you roll on to another conveyor belt, and then are directed into the trucks. And out that little trapdoor down there, there are two trapdoors, really. Well, there's actually two open now, but there's five loading spots there. Five loading spots. Yes, sir. And we use every one of them spots. Then they're picked

up over there by the truck. And from there, they're moved on out. Other picked up there by the truck and loaded into the truck. And from the truck, why the driver takes them to his certain spots of delivery. Distribution point. Distribution point, yes sir. I think that's what our next stop is going to be. We're going to move with the truck and go out to the distribution point. And from there, we'll deliver the paper to the home. Well, this is certainly a fine operation, Harry. There's not much trouble here. All you have to do is make sure that the machines are running right. That is correct, sir. It's all automatic. Yes, sir. Harry, thanks a minute for talking to us. I want to get back here to Mr. Spear just a moment. Mr. Spear, how do we know that one of these papers coming off of this assembly line here is going to actually arrive at Mr. Grayson's house this morning? Well, as you notice through that opening there, these papers are going right into a truck. And that truck is directly going out to the distributors. The man in charge of our trucking operation is our city circulator, Phil Dendi. And Phil is here if you'd like to ask him a few questions. Phil, first of all, I wonder if we could take our little ride with one of your

trucks because we want to carry through this delivery. We want to go out to the distribution point and find out just exactly how Grayson is going to get this paper, which he subscribed to yesterday. But first of all, I want you to tell me a little bit about your operation. We've carried the paper through from the presses onto this into this mailing department down the conveyor belt and out the little trap door over there into the truck. Now what happens? Well, from there, a driver loads his truck. He has all from anywhere from 10 to 15 agencies to deliver papers to. How many papers does he take? All approximately. I say in an average 10 ,000 papers. And he takes him out to this delivery point. Our display of sayings he's throughout the city. Does each truck have one special distribution point to go to? No, you may have 10 distribution points to go to. Go to the general area of the city. Right. How many drivers do you have, Phil? Oh, approximately 250 drivers. How many trucks? About, or I'd say 200 trucks or so. And then you're moving around town quite often with 200 trucks. People see that Chicago sometimes

truck very frequently, I can imagine. Definitely. 24 hours a day. 24 hours a day. Right. Okay, Phil. Now we want to go out to the trucks and take a look at it and probably take a little ride with your truck driver out to the point of distribution. Would you join us? Surely. All right, Phil. We're standing outside of your office right now. Outside of the little shoot or trap door that we saw from the inside. And we can see the papers rolling on here now and off of this little shoot. And into the truck, which is standing just to the lower level of it. Actually, this truck is out on the lower level of Wacker Drive. As you probably have remembered, seeing some of the sometimes trucks pulling out of the lower level. Now, this is probably a good spot to be pulling your truck out from, because you can easily turn right or turn left from here, Phil, right? Correct. Now, the papers are being piled in the truck, as I said. And they'll almost be filled up on just a matter of seconds. How many papers will this particular truck take? Oh, I'd say about 11 ,000 papers. 11 ,000 papers. Now, the next thing we want to do

is to board that truck and take a brief trip out to the point of distribution. Well, we'll pick up that description order. Mr. Grayson's in seat two at that paper is delivered. We want to thank you very much, Phil, for talking to us. It's a pleasure talking to you, sir. Before we take that trip, we have just a couple of seconds. I want to talk to Mr. Spir again. The thing that we've noticed throughout the entire operation, from the point that we brought the subscription into your office, all the way to this truck where we have it delivered, about ready to be delivered, is a matter of speed and efficiency with which you operate. Now, why so much speed? What's the difference if you're maybe two, three, maybe five minutes late? It's not a matter of two or three minutes. It's a matter of thousands of newspapers, and we have four presses, actually, running. The number of papers on a particular presser, 30 ,000, when you multiply by five, that means we print 120 ,000 papers an hour. Obviously, four or five minutes off each press means hundreds and thousands of papers that we can't get out in time. And all of our delivery is synchronized with flashes and relays to get the paper to the reader in time. As you do, of course, no, no, it's as perishable. We're very

anxious to get it out there rapidly. With safety, I might add, though. I might add that a little while ago while we were in the mail room, I'm not sure that the listeners could hear it or not, but I certainly can. There was a sort of a squawk box, a public address system, calling out some orders. What was that for? That was the dispatch man who was calling various trucks to various of the various shoots. We have nine shoots in the front end and five over here, and various trucks are dispatched to the individual shoots starting at their papers. So he was calling orders out to the truck just to where to go, and the number of papers per truck. In other words, you would call into the mail room 2 ,000, shoot seven truck number 34, and that would be the order delivered out of that shoot into that truck. All right, we'll meet up with you a little bit later when we talk about other angles of circulation. But right now, we're interested primarily at home delivery. Because we want to make sure that this paper is going to get to grace in this morning, because he asked specifically that it'd been delivered this morning. So we'll take a ride on one of your trucks. You're welcome aboard. Mr. Hill, this is John Ward, one of

our drivers. John is making this particular delivery. You said you wanted to ride with him. John, see they get a good ride. Will you? Yes. Okay, John, move over a little bit here so I can climb aboard and we'll take off. All right, the truck is on its way, and we're on the way with it. We're heading out to West Lake Street in the neighborhood where Mr. Grayson lives. We'll be getting there in just a minute. We won't be able to record the entire trip. We turned left on lower -wacker drive, and it'll take us so approximately how long to get out to that West Lake for 20 minutes. About 20 minutes. All right, then we'll be there, and we'll pick up our recording again when we arrive at the point of distribution where the papers are distributed from to Mr. Grayson's home and other subscribers on the West side. We're pulling it now to 62 -12 West Lake Street. First of all, he's pulled out to the left, and then he's going to back up. This is the point of distribution that we were talking about. They call them the distributor, and the distributor will in turn send out the papers to

certain locations. John, we want to thank you very much for a very fine ride through the streets of Chicago, and believe me, you've felt a certainly do observe all the rules and regulations that the city of Chicago has laid down, and certainly, uh, sometimes drivers have every reason to get that safety award. Thank you. Thank you very much. We're now on the Office of Mr. Edward Epstein, who is the distributor for the West Side, one of the distributors that is, for the Chicago Sun Times. We have here Mr. Epstein, the paper which will be delivered to Mr. Herb Grayson at 52 -12 West Lake. Now, this is a special order. It's something that doesn't happen very frequently with the Sun Ties, but we did make a special order for this particular broadcast. This paper arrived in a group of, well, how many? I think they delivered around 1 ,000, didn't they? That's right, sir. Now, what happens? How do we make sure that Mr. Grayson is going to get a Sun Ties this morning? When I got the special order for the Sun Times, I immediately wrote up a start order. On this start order, it gives the name,

the address, and the floor where the paper is to be delivered. Also, if it's to be delivered in the front or the rear. And from there, it goes to the newsboy that delivers that route. Well, we were at the home of Mr. Grayson with Larry McGrale, just yesterday, and this is a residence, and it's to be delivered to the front door. Now, what did you receive this order from the Sun Times? Now, we took a downtown to Mr. Spears office yesterday and took it through its process. I received a special order yesterday afternoon on it. I see. All right. Now, I want to know how this gets into the delivery boy's hands, and what happens to the paper after he once gets it? The start order is given to the boy, and it'll be Larry McGrale. Well, Larry has just walked in. It's rather early in the morning. It's a quarter of five to be exact. And Larry is up awfully early, but for a newspaper boy, I guess that's a matter of doing it every day, isn't it? That's right. All right. Now, Larry has walked in, so what happens now? Larry, I have a special start here for Mr. Grayson at 5 ,212 Lake Street.

That's a house. Now, we're sure to deliver it this morning, and you'll get a regular start for it tomorrow morning. Okay, I'll take care of it. We now have our paper delivered to Mr. Herb Grayson, so we have our story concluded. But not quite concluded, because we've come back down to the office of Lou Spear, who is the circulation manager. We talked to him as you'll remember earlier in the program. There is much more to circulation than just the home delivery, obviously. You have delivery of the sun times throughout the United States, and for that matter, I suppose, throughout the world. You have special deliveries, for example, in helicopters that you might have seen, or at least heard about, when they deliver them to special points. And then, of course, there is street delivery, which is a very big thing in the newspaper business, because many, many people buy their papers on the streets. Now, Mr. Spear, let's start out from what I have here a list, and we'll start off at the top, and that's your special helicopter. This is the first time I've ever heard a newspaper delivering its papers in a helicopter. What's the meaning of all

that? Well, as you've probably seen, and certainly read about, we're building a new building, and one of the things that we have at the building is a helicopter port, where we're going to be able to land helicopters and take off. At a quarter to five every evening, we come out with the next morning's paper. It's called the Bulldog Edition, and of course, in the sun times, it's called the Green Diamond. This is the very latest paper that any newspaper puts out. But one of the problems we have with that is delivery. As you know, about that time of the day, everybody is going home, and it's almost impossible to get these papers delivered to the outlying parts of the city before the people leave their jobs or in their way home. Obviously, once they're home, it's hard to reach them. So, as an experimental thing, we've been experimenting with the possibility delivering papers by helicopter, getting them out to these outlying areas where our trucks could be waiting for them, and thereby get the papers out just that much quicker. Does it work successfully? Yes. Of course, the helicopter we're now using is very small,

where the people who manufacture these, Sikorsky people, for instance, tell us that they expect to have a helicopter available soon that we'll be able to take a whole truck load of papers, which should mean 10 or 11 ,000 papers. Well, that's a special story in itself, and I wish we had time to go into it on this program. Perhaps we can come back and do the story of helicopter delivery and actually take a trip. We took a trip in one of your trucks, and may I say that it was a very sane and safe ride. I mentioned during the ride that the sometimes has received a safety award. That's true, is it not? Yes, we've wanted two years in a row. We have a safety program, and our drivers are safety -minded, and are doing a wonderful, wonderful job. We have a safety prizes for them every year. We have a safety director, fellow chap named John McCarthy, and the drivers are doing just a remarkable job of safety. No, very few accidents. The listeners will undoubtedly be happy that we brought up this subject, because I think through a misconception, this is a sore point among people in Chicago. They think that the drivers of newspaper trucks exceed the

speed limits and the law sort of winks at them. What do you have to say to those reports? That may have been true sometime ago, and no longer is. Police Department have instructions to arrest our drivers or any other drivers, and they do it, too. And our drivers, if they are arrested twice for speeding, automatically lose their jobs, and we have lost very few drivers this week. Well, now let's go into some other facets of the circulation department, Mr. Spear, and specifically street delivery. As I mentioned, that's certainly one of the most important, maybe the most important part of circulation. Yes, the actual test of a newspaper's ability, the sell itself, is a number of nickels people put down to buy it. The sun times is probably the largest street sale newspaper in Chicago today. How do you get the papers out there, the same method that you use to deliver them to the homes that is by truck? Yes, in the city. They all go out by truck with the exception of outline parts of the city where we may sometimes use trains to get them out, they're just a little bit quicker. Now you mentioned that you have a large street sale circulation. What is your total circulation?

We're shooting for 600 ,000 this month. And how does that stack up with the rest of the papers in town? We're the second largest paper in town. We did the story of a special drive to get subscriptions. A young lad, as you know, got an order from Mr. Grayson, and that adds to his total of five, and he's going to get himself a train set for Christmas. Why do you have these circulation drives? Well, you have a certain number of people coming into the community, certain number of youngsters growing up and developing families of their own, you have people dying, and we have to constantly replace this kind of business. We are the youngest paper in Chicago, and obviously we think we're the best, and so we're very anxious to get our paper into as many homes as possible, hoping and feeling quite sure that the more people see and read our paper and more people will like it and continue to buy it. Mr. Spear, we don't have much time left, but I want to talk briefly about promotion, and that certainly is a major part of the newspaper business to promote the sale of the Chicago Sun Times. We have a promotion department in the Sun Times, and probably the best promotion department

of any paper, and the man in charge of that is Mel Barker, and he's best equipped to tell you what they do. Mr. Barker is in the office with us at the moment. Could you come over just a second, Mr. Barker, and tell us about the promotion department? Well, the promotion department uses practically every medium of communication to get our message across to the people of Chicago that the Sun Times is a great paper, both editorially and in a public service way. We use billboards, radio, television, direct mail, just about everything, bus cards, train cards, everything you can think of. We use puzzle contests. As you see in the paper, we use premium drives. We have especially events such as the Harvest Moon Festival, which is coming up next month, public service events, all to call attention to the paper in a public service way and bill the public attitude

towards our papers so that people will like us and will want to buy our product. Well, I'm sure that they do because you have, as Mr. Spear said, the second largest circulation in the city of Chicago. There are many other things that we'd like to talk about in the circulation department of the Chicago Sun Times, but time does not permit. We want to thank Mr. Spear for helping us out in describing to you what a circulation department of a major metropolitan paper is like. And that's the story of circulation at the Chicago Sun Times. This is Hugh Hill speaking.