Word: levand
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Talons over Talent. The Wichita battle started in the '20s when the Beacon was taken over by brothers Max, John and Louis (who died in 1953) Levand, who had learned the newspaper business under Publishers Frederick Bonfils and Harry Tammen in the carnival atmosphere (1895-1933) of the Denver Post. The Levands jazzed up the Beacon's copy, said that they would run the Eagle off the streets. The Eagle, under Publisher Marcellus Murdock, fought back with talons rather than talent, screaming: "Since the Levands came here ... a new word has come into use in Wichita...
...bitterness intensified, the Beacon backers accused the Eagle of injecting anti-Semitic lines in its news columns (the Levands are Jewish), while Eagle staffers spread rumors that the Beacon was getting ads by threatening to publish photographs of solid citizens surprised by Beacon photographers in compromising situations. The Eagle wrote balefully of "the threat of Levand influence," went out of its way to talk about "Max Levand of the Wichita Beacon, who owes the Government nearly $10,000 in taxes." When Marcellus Murdock's daughter went East and married a Jew, the Eagle said nothing, but the Beacon told...