In St. Paul

St. Paul, Minnesota capital, has a newspaper, The St. Paul Pioneer Press. It is the usual stodgy and amorphous compendium of local accidents, arrests, entertainments, boiler-plate hokus-pokus from New York, syndicated national news service. Like the papers of other middle-sized middle-western cities, The St. Paul Pioneer Press functions, apparently, on the assumption that few events that happen in Europe are important enough to be told to the people of St. Paul.

St. Paul has a Mayor. He is only 30--the youngest mayor ever elected there. An American Legion man, popular in his crowd, he has given the city a business administration, progressive and clean. He is an Elk, a Mason, a Redman, a member of the Modern Woodmen of America, with a slack, ready mouth, a touch of Irish in his nose, a touch of Scandinavian in his cheek bones, and a pair of spectacles. His name is Arthur E. Nelson.

Now the people of St. Paul, at least the more intelligent of them, have long been dissatisfied with The St. Paul Pioneer Press. They hoped that Mayor Nelson was too. A month ago the publishers of the Pioneer Press invited Mayor Nelson to edit their paper for one day. He accepted. And 'the more Intelligent People hoped that he would put some foreign news in it, take the fog out of it, compress it, organize it, speed it up. Doubtless he knew a thing or two about newspaper editing or he would not have been asked to take--or accept --the post of guest-editor.

Last Sunday morning they woke up and stared at the wallpaper of their bedrooms. "What," they thought sleepily, "was going to happen today?". With a start they remembered that it was the day for Mayor Nelson's paper, hurried into their clothes and downstairs to where the Sunday paper waited with its many crisp, exciting layers, like a pile of griddle cakes, beside their coffee cups. With what a sinking of the heart they crackled through those layers. Why, except for an extra page about religion, and the fact that there was no "immorality" on the front page (all crime news was segregated in an inside section) the Pioneer was the same streaky lump it had been before.

On the first page under the headline: AN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND AN APOLOGY. Mayor Nelson asked them to be tolerant. He did not know anything about editing a newspaper, he said.

Then people remembered that they had been warned. Early in October the Press proclaimed that it was only Mayor Nelson's "customary courage" that had mada him think he could edit a newspaper. "Will his customary courage," wondered readers, "indue? him to fiddle with the St. Paul's orchestra, to pitch for the St. Paul baseball nine, to preach in St. Paul's pulpits, to teach in the St. Paul High School, to drive the St. Paul trolley car?"