Fight in Mount Dora

In nearly nine years as editor of the Mount Dora (Fla.) weekly Topic, Mabel Norris Reese has drawn blood from the Ku Klux Klan and race-baiting Bryant Bowles, and earned herself a clutch of journalism awards and scores of enemies. Although the K.K.K. burned a cross on her lawn and poisoned her dog, Editor Reese was not intimidated. She continued to play stories on the five children of Orange Picker Allan Platt (TIME, Dec. 13, 1954) who were ousted from a white school in Mount Dora on the ground that they were Negroes, although they claimed to be of Irish-Indian descent.* Last week Editor Reese was facing a new kind of challenge. An opposition weekly, the Mount Dora Herald, had been started with the encouragement of residents who find the Topic too true to be good. Its owner: Thomas P. Dwyer, onetime Chicago Hearst reporter who has been Midwest sales and advertising director for the Conover-Mast trade publications.

The Herald defends "the South's deeply grooved traditions," last week headlined its lead editorial: COMMUNIST INFLUENCE OBVIOUS IN SUPREME COURT SEGREGATION DECISIONS. (The Topic has urged a moderate approach to the problems of integration.) Merchants crammed the first twelve-page issue of the Herald with advertising.

Editor Reese reported losing no advertisers and only one subscriber, said her fellow citizens are "too intelligent" to support "a spite sheet." But the fight will be bitter. Says Herald Managing Editor Julia G. Swart: "We hope to be the only paper here. The town is not big enough to support two papers."

* The Lake County school board will probably try to prove in Circuit Court that the Platts are legally, i.e., at least one-eighth, Negro.

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