Afternoon in Gridley

George Plummer McNear Jr. does not believe in obeying a law that he hates. His 239-mile Toledo, Peoria & Western Railroad was returned to him last October, after 42 months of Government operation under seizure. Immediately his union rail employes struck. The line has been strike-bound ever since. George McNear refused to negotiate". He said he would see the railroad and himself go broke first.

No train ran until three weeks ago. Then a locomotive chuffed out with a few cars. There was a rock-throwing fracas; a picket was shot at and wounded. A few days later, shotgun pellets ripped through a picket's shanty. Nobody was hit.

One night last week, Irwin ("Pants") Paschon, the line's striking head timekeeper, got a telephone call at his Peoria home. An anonymous voice said: "You're going to get what the picket shanty got." Next day Pants Paschon and a score of fellow pickets watched a strange-looking train pull out of the T.P. & W.'s East Peoria yards. Ahead of the locomotive was an armored gondola. Behind the engine were three freight cars and a steel caboose. The train carried six crewmen, 14 guards and some guns.

The Chase. Led by their strike boss G. F. Brown, the pickets ran to their automobiles, sped east on U.S. Route 24, which parallels the T.P. & W.'s tracks, and soon passed the rolling train. At Eureka the strikers parked near the tracks. As the caboose passed, they threw rocks and stones. Shotgun blasts roared from the train. No picket was hit.

The strikers drove on. At Gridley they deployed into three groups along the highway and in a small park beside the tracks. When the train came, one group cut loose with rocks again. The train went on to the edge of the town, started to back onto a siding. Four guards got off and walked ahead of the caboose.

The pickets yelled: "You dirty . . . scabs." The four guards reached a hand switch. Some of the pickets moved toward them. One of the guards yelled, "Don't come any closer," and fired his gun into the ground. Then there was a lot of shooting.

Five of the pickets fell. One was Arthur Browne, a striking engineer. He was dead. Another was Pants Paschon. He was dead. The others were seriously wounded. All but one had been hit in the back or side.

The Finish. State police found evidence that some pickets had brought guns to the scene, but no evidence that any had been used. Later that afternoon the four guards--all discharged servicemen, said by the union to have been paid $375 a month by George McNear--were charged with murder. The brotherhoods' leaders, offering to give evidence that McNear had transported the guns, demanded that he be arrested on the same charge.

McNear, who has been bitterly fighting the unions almost continuously since he bought the line in 1926, was at lunch in Peoria's Creve Coeur Club when the shooting broke out. Afterward he insisted that the strikers had fired first; the guards in self-defense. Next day he took to bed.

Thus had come the first U.S. strike killing in three years. George McNear's tracks were red now with more than rust.

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