Now It Can Be Told

Though their readers may be unaware of the fact, newspapers go to great lengths to be circumspect whenever they report lotteries: U.S. postal laws prohibit news of lotteries. News of Irish Sweepstakes winners is usually lifted out of any editions going through the mail. But a news story which broke two months ago in Ahoskie, N.C. was something different. It involved a raffle, but the point was that a Negro who had drawn the winning number had.been refused the prize, a Cadillac.

In St. Louis, Postmaster Bernard F. Dickmann read the Star-Times account of it, and got off a knuckle-rapping letter to the Star-Times. Its gist: if he had seen the paper that day, he would have barred it from the mail. Furthermore, if he had read TIME, LIFE, Newsweek and the other publications that carried the story, he would have barred them, too.

Star-Times Publisher Elzey Roberts countered with a defiant open letter to officious, slowfooted Dickmann. It was absurd, Roberts said, to make it "legal to listen to such news [by radio] and illegal to read it" in a paper. In Washington, Dickmann's fellow St. Louisan and political sponsor, Postmaster General Robert Hannegan, agreed with Publisher Roberts, and ruled that the law didn't literally mean what it said. Henceforth "incidental reporting of a lottery" will not bar a paper from the mails.

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