Rover Boys Rewarded

"Right now, we're not covering anything bigger than a bed," grinned the Portland Oregonian's Reporter Wallace Turner last week. "We're just sitting around with fat, happy smiles on our faces." Reporters seldom earn so rich a right to sit and grin as have Wally Turner, 36, and his Oregonian teammate, William Lambert, 37. Since the day in February 1956 when Rackets Promoter James ("Big Jim") Elkins told the reporting team about his conspiracy with Teamsters Union officials to operate a profitable vice empire in Portland, Turner and Lambert had toiled heroically to document the story.

Their digging resulted in the roughest, riskiest expose ever carried by the 107-year-old Oregonian. It earned them the American Newspaper Guild's 1957 Heywood Broun Award.* And last week, as a grand jury handed down indictments in Portland, as the mighty Dave Beck fell off his high wagon, Turner and Lambert reaped the even greater satisfaction of knowing that their unlikely tale of local corruption had unfolded into a major national story.

Rshface & Bug-Eyes. Without the Oregonian's disclosures, the U.S. Senate's McClellan committee might have looked in on the International Brotherhood of Teamsters merely as part of a general inquiry into the abuse of union welfare funds, and, through Teamster Boss Dave Beck's longstanding income-tax troubles, probably would even have penetrated to the Teamster chieftain's big-time peccadilloes. But Turner and Lambert gave McClellan's men a slam-bang first act that stirred immediate nationwide support for the inquiry and propelled the investigation straight to Western Conference Boss Frank Brewster, key figure in the Portland scandal. From there it was a short hop into Dave Beck's plush Seattle parlor.

For Sam Newhouse's staid Oregonian --a comfortable, conservative newspaper that is normally inclined to sit back and rock on Portland's front porch--it was a tough and hazardous story. Judged by his police record, Racket Boss Elkins was, at best, an impeachable source. The villains in Elkins' story were not men to meddle with lightly--a Teamster organizer and ex-convict, as well as Multnomah County District Attorney William Langley and Sheriff (now Mayor) Terry Schrunk, both Teamster proteges. After listening to 70 hours of conversations between the key figures, tape-recorded by Elkins when he suspected a doublecross, Turner and Lambert spent three perilous months checking and double-checking the tale of the tapes. In the course of their investigation, they came to be called the Rover Boys by fellow newsmen, Fishface and Bug-Eyes by wary racketmen.

Exposes & Affidavits. The Oregonian (circ. 230,850) was braced for the shocked reaction its expose caused among readers. What it did not expect was a violent counterattack from its rival daily, the Oregon Journal (circ. 181,489). Soundly beaten on the story and unable to lay hands on the tape-recorded evidence, the Journal sent a reporter along with D.A. Langley on a hoked-up raid on an Elkins aide who had some tapes in his possession. The tapes were turned over to the Journal reporter, who allowed the Teamster organizer to copy them, and were then handed to a federal grand jury, which promptly indicted Elkins for wiretapping. The Journal ran fevered "exposes" blasting the then mayor, the police chief and other officials who had helped verify the Oregonian story. The Journal even supported Sheriff Schrunk in his campaign for mayor, and Schrunk won.

With the indictment last week of Schrunk and Langley on charges of accepting bribes from racketeers, every conspirator named by the Oregonian was facing criminal action. (Langley, who had filed libel suits for $2,000,000 against the Oregonian and several individuals who supported its story, quietly dropped them.) Still the rival Journal stuck to its guns. On Page One it ran an affidavit from Clifford ("Jimmy") Bennett, operator of an Elkins-backed after-hours drinking dive, in which Bennett denied his previous story that he had paid Schrunk $500 protection money in September 1955--the incident on which the indictment was based. Though last week it ran two editorials criticizing Teamster brass, the Journal continued to maintain, as its Editor Arden Pangborn had put it to Senator McClellan, that it had no space for reporting based on "contact with pimps, madams and prostitutes."

The Oregonian-Journal battle had a parallel in Seattle, Beck's headquarters, where the Times (circ. 190,789) teamed eagerly with the Oregonian on the story and Hearst's Post-Intelligencer (circ. 208,224) did its best to ignore the scandal (TIME, March 11). When Beck returned from Europe last month, he at first refused to be interviewed by any newsman except the PI's Douglass Welch--who with P-I Editorial Writer Nard Jones has turned out a Horatio Algerish version of Beck's life struggle. Later, when the Times gleefully quoted Beck's admission that he had paid Welch and Jones a handsome advance out of his own (or the Teamsters') pocket, the P-I ran an embarrassed story explaining that the unpublished (and unsold) book was the reporters' "private, off-hours project."

While the P-I in the past month, for the first time, has run editorials and syndicated columns criticizing the Teamsters, it has not yet run a line condemning Beck or Brewster; nor has it carried one staff-written story on the hearings. The Times, too, has made only the mildest editorial references to Beck, but it has been busy unearthing local skulduggery by the Teamsters, and has assigned a staff reporter to cover the Washington hearings.

Respect v. Love. In Seattle, as in Portland, the contrasts in coverage illustrate a truth about the condition of the press that is seldom stated. It was stated last week by Atlanta Constitution Editor Ralph McGill in a column of praise for the Oregonian: "There are too many newspapers which are like fat cats. They are contented. Their editorials are 'constructive' and they do not think that controversy belongs in a newspaper. There are other newspapers whose motto, though they never so define it, is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. These are the newspapers which do not want to be loved--but hope to be respected."

Also speaking out for the Oregonian, another veteran editor said last week in a

Portland TV interview: "The Oregonian was correct in what it did. I continue to believe that the newspaper is the watchdog of the community." The speaker: City Editor Arthur Crookham, who retired in 1954 after 27 years on the Oregon Journal.

* A second time for Wally Turner, who won it in 1952 for a series on the illegal sale of timber from Indian lands.

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