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to get agreement from two families with maybe 30 or 40 members, all of whom are on the payroll, would be impossible--unless you kept them on the payroll [laughter] or paid them off in some extravagant way. So we just backed off at that time. And then later on--fifteen, twenty years later--the story started up again, I guess it was when Albritton bought the--first he bought the paper, and then--
But you were interested in buying it, right?
We were interested in buying it--
How did that happen?
I think that was--that was when Scotty Reston called and said: “I think the paper is for sale. Wouldn't you be interested in buying it?”
Why did he call you?
Oh, he's an old friend of mine, and he's--well, at a future date I'll tell you about Scotty Reston and John Gardner and how he was very useful and instrumental in getting something going. But he had been sort of the father of the Times at the time of the death of my wife's former husband. And he sort of held things together for a while until Punch Sulzburger came along. And he was very close to my wife and therefore I saw a lot of him, and got to like him very much, and we even went off on Safari together, and so
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