Word: thomson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...blond Dick Thomson looked ahead and said, "I'm carsick-stop the car." The young man at the wheel, a slim, brown-haired fellow named Jim Meuler, headed off the road and stopped. At that moment Thomson reached behind the seat, picked up a length of iron pipe, and hit his companion a crashing blow on the back of the skull. Meuler jerked the door open and managed to lurch out, dazed, bleeding and incredulous. Thomson was his closest friend...
Assailant Thomson and Victim Meuler, both automobile men, had taken to each other at their first chance meeting two years ago. Six months later, full of hope and mutual admiration, they formed a partnership and bought a Nash agency (the T and M Motors) in Newport. It was a shoestring venture (in case of some unforeseen accident, they took out $10,000 double-indemnity life-insurance policies on each other), but for a while they did well. Dick moved in with Jim and his wife and two children, and they lived together, ate together and worked together...
...however, business began to go slack. One evening last week, the partners climbed into a new demonstrator and headed north to discuss financing with a Portland bank. They finished the 100-mile journey, registered at a tourist camp, ate a steak dinner and dropped in at a nightclub. Then Thomson announced that the company records, which they had thrust into the dashboard compartment of the car, were missing. At his insistence, they made a long night drive back to Newport, got duplicates, and then, just as dawn was breaking, headed for Portland again-and for violence at Cape Foulweather...
Cure-All. From then on, Thomson expanded rapidly. Frequently, he didn't even see the paper he was buying, based his decision on its balance sheet. He likes to say: "There's nothing in this business that a few thousand dollars of ad sales can't cure." He bought the St. Petersburg Independent because "I want something to keep me busy while I'm down there vacationing...
...Scotland, where his parents were born, Thomson has bigger ideas. Although he has no plans to change the staff or the policies (Tory) of his three new papers, the "fact that we intend to follow the same editorial policy doesn't preclude certain changes. First we have to work with the paper and learn what it needs. But some changes would be obvious to American newspaper operators, front-page ads, for example, and column widths. Maybe there's good reason in Scotland for front-page ads; we'll have...