Talk:William J. Dorvillier

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TIME magazine -- Friday, May. 12, 1961 -- The Right Word

William J. Dorvillier, 53, editor and publisher of Puerto Rico's San Juan Star, is a Roman Catholic. But last fall, during the Puerto Rican elections, he had angry words for three bishops of the island's Roman Catholic Church. Said Dorvillier in a front-page editorial: "The Catholic bishops who signed the pastoral letter forbidding Catholics from voting for the Popular Democratic Party have transgressed grievously against the people of Puerto Rico, against their country and against the Catholic Church." Last week Dorvillier's uncompromising fight for separation of church and state won him the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

Even though the Star is one of the youngest (18 months) and smallest (circ. 12,300) dailies ever to win a Pulitzer, the award was well earned. Last October, when the bishops sought to unseat Governor Luis Muñoz Marin for what they called "anti-Catholicism" (among other things, they objected to his approval of government birth control programs), Dorvillier's Star was the only paper on the island—which is 90% Catholic—to campaign editorially against the clerics' intervention.

While San Juan's Spanish dailies, El Mundo (circ. 58,586) and El Impartial (51,720) dropped out after protesting the pastoral letter, the Star persisted boldly with 20 editorials that drew a stinging answer from the church. James Edward McManus, Bishop of Ponce and leader of the church attack on Muñoz Marin, charged Dorvillier with being "emotionally unbalanced," in a letter which Dorvillier published in full, without comment.

Born in Massachusetts, Bill Dorvillier went to Puerto Rico on his honeymoon and decided to stay. For the next 20 years, he aspired to do just what he is doing now: run a successful English-language daily in San Juan. The Star is his third attempt. During the 1940s, Dorvillier edited the Puerto Rico World Journal, English-language subsidiary of El Mundo, but El Mundo dropped the paper when many of its readers—U.S. servicemen stationed in Puerto Rico—went home after the war. Dorvillier also presided over the World Journal's brief and ill-fated revival in 1957.

In 1959, when U.S. Publisher Gardner Cowles (Look Magazine, the Des Moines Register and Tribune) came to San Juan. Dorvillier talked Cowles out of enough money to start the Star (TIME, Sept. 21, 1959). A tiny tabloid, the Star stirred little more than amusement around the city room at El Mundo. As a result of its own bitter experience, the paper was convinced that an English-language newspaper could not survive in San Juan. Said the Star's Dorvillier dryly: "That impression will be corrected shortly." As it turned out, "shortly" was precisely the word.

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