from FLORENCE HARDING: THE FIRST LADY, THE JAZZ AGE, AND THE DEATH OF AMERICA'S MOST SCANDALOUS PRESIDENT, by Carl Sferrazza Anthony. William Morrow and Company, 645 pp. $30.

Anthony is the author of, among other books, First Ladies.

As Warren was being massaged at Dr. J.H. Kellogg's famous sanitarium in Battle Creek, the [Marion, Ohio] Star's business manager quit. Someone alerted Mrs. Harding. She saw her opportunity. The next morning she got on Warren's bicycle, rode to the Star, took over, and never left.

When she began, about seven hundred subscribers were paying ten cents a week. Florence's first order of business, she said, was to "build a circulation department." Through ads and word of mouth, she assembled several dozen boys, most under ten, from working-class families that would welcome boys' wages. Drawing from the lists of customers who were obliged to come down and pick up their papers at the counter, Florence mapped out several routes on a grid and thereby devised Marion's first door-to-door delivery service, her fleet of "newsies"serving homes and businesses.

In Marion the children were known as "Mrs. Harding's boys." As Jane Dixon recalled, "Every newsie was to her a potential son, and she treated him as such. She was their confidante, their big sister, and their boss. When they fell ill, she sent them bulging baskets of goodies and a first class doctor. When they were well, she made them ‘bustle like all get out.'" She also boosted their self-esteem, organizing a social club, establishing a value system from which she gave out awards for achievement and demerits for bad work. The boys were paid weekly in silver, but a customer complaint meant pay in cumbersome pennies. "Next week, if you do a better job," she told her miscreants, "you get a silver dollar again." The boys were held responsible for their actions. When some whittled a fence, she docked their pay to cover repair costs. "Here is one of my boys," she often said while patting one of them; "he will be famous some day."

Later to become a renowned Socialist leader, Norman Thomas, who proved to be the most successful of her newsboys, recalled her with qualified warmth, despite their political differences as adults. "Mrs. Harding, in those days, ran the show. She was a woman of very narrow mentality and range of interest or understanding, but of strong will and within a certain area, of genuine kindness. She got along well with newsboys . . . in whom she took a kind of maternal interest. It was her energy and business sense which made the Star . . . . Her husband was the front."

Ultimately, Florence's discipline seemed to benefit the newsies; a majority grew up to become successful businessmen and journalists.

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