Helena Reads Again

If the White House should burn to the ground this week, citizens of Helena will read about it in their own two newspapers. If such an event had happened during the past three months, the highly literate citizens of Montana's capital (pop. 11,803) would have had to get their news elsewhere.

In mid-May Helena's union printers went on strike, asking higher wages. The arch-Democratic Independent (Montana's oldest) and the arch-Republican Record-Herald stopped publication.

In Germany, scores of men died in the Nazi blood purge. From the Pacific Coast radio bore the news over the Continental Divide, into the hollow of Prickly Pear Valley to Helena's radio owners. They telephoned their friends.

In Chicago, Federal agents shot John Dillinger dead. Next day on Helena's Main Street (called Last Chance Gulch, when gold was first discovered there) that story passed up and down by word of mouth.

In Austria, Nazis killed Chancellor Dollfuss. In Helena, people crowded around the newspaper offices to gawp at bulletins.

In Neudeck, Paul von Hindenburg died. Helena citizens read the news hours and days late in newspapers brought 45 miles from Butte, 70 miles from Great Falls.

But such outside news sources were of no help for little Helena during Montana's primary campaign last month. Campaign cards were made up by hand, reproduced by photographers, distributed by small boys or by the candidates themselves.

Last week Helena's newspaper strike was settled. Printers, on the promise that their demand for a 30-c- per hour wage increase would be arbitrated this autumn, agreed to resume work at the old scale (90-97-c-).

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