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FRANK J. PRINCE, MAIN UNIVERSAL MATCH OWNER, is EX-CONVICT, trumpeted a St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline over a long story carrying the byline of tough, tireless Reporter Ted Link. The story told how Frank Prince, 71, principal stockholder in St. Louis' Universal Match Corp. and a complex of subsidiary firms, had, between 1908 and 1925, served three prison terms, totaling nearly ten years, for forgery, grand larceny, and issuing fraudulent checks. Two days later the PD, in its ice-cold charity, followed up with another Prince piece, repeating the same facts and adding a few of even less...
...Post-Dispatch stories were factually accurate. Frank Prince did have a prison record. That record was known to many if not all of his friends and business associates. It was known to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had nonetheless cleared Prince for defense contracts. It had even been mentioned in Dun & Bradstreet. Indeed, among those closest to Prince, two of the few who did not know of his record were his wife and 24-year...
Return for a Gift. But were the Post-Dispatch stories relevant as news? By the paper's own accounting, Frank Prince had stayed in the clear for the last 35 years. The manner in which the stories came about added even graver doubts as to their moral merit. Last fall Prince gave $500,000 to St. Louis' Washington University. Although he attached no strings to the gift, the university planned to name a building after him. It was while gathering biographical material on Philanthropist Prince that the crime-hunting Post-Dispatch came across the facts of his distant...
...market shares fell 15¾ points by week's end. Frank Prince was, understandably, personally distressed. "I have never asked anyone not to publish anything about me," he said. "But this is a vicious thing." Richard Amberg, publisher of the rival St. Louis Globe-Democrat, accused the Post-Dispatch of "the dirtiest Goddamned piece of journalism I've ever seen in my life." At Washington University, Chancellor Ethan A. H. Shepley calmly acknowledged that he knew all about Prince's record, just as calmly said that the university still meant to name a building after Prince...
Letters of Protest. At week's end the Post-Dispatch, under the heading, "Dissent to a Story," printed several letters of protest. Example: "If Mr. Prince has paid his 'debt to society,' why then hold up his past to public opprobrium?" But beyond that, the paper was unmoved. "I really don't want to discuss the story," said Editor Joseph Pulitzer Jr. Said Managing Editor Raymond L. Crowley: "I think the stories simply speak for themselves." Indeed they did-but not so much about Frank Prince as about the Post-Dispatch...