Bemedaled Chroniclers

On the eve of San Francisco's general strike last month, quiet-spoken Publisher George Toland Cameron of the Chronicle took rooms for his newshawks at a hotel across the street from his plant, filled his basement with foodstuffs, bided his time. When the strike hit the city's food supply, he fed his employes in the Chronicle's cooking school on the second floor of his Gothic building, cheered up photographers who returned from the embattled Embarcadero with smashed cameras, had a pat on the back for red-eyed, coughing newshawks who had been through the No-Man's Land of teargas, brickbats, bullets and flying railroad spikes.

From time to time a rock crashed through a window of the Chronicle's office. Bomb threats directed at "the capitalistic sheet'' grew dire. Employes were threatened by telephone at home. But unarmed and unguarded. Chronicle reporters went about their business. Chronicle circulation huskies ran the daily gauntlet of labor hoodlums.

Such devotion to duty did not pass unnoticed by "Uncle George'' Cameron, who made a fortune in the cement business long before he inherited the Chronicle from his father-in-law in 1925. Last week he appeared at the Chronicle with 161 jewelers' boxes. Inside each little box was a small gold medal inscribed, within laurel

wreaths: PRESENTED TO _____ BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE IN GRATEFUL APPRECIATION OF EFFORTS AND COURAGE IN THE SAN FRANCISCO GENERAL STRIKE 1934. Without ceremony department chiefs parcelled the medals out to everyone who had been in jeopardy.

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