Blackout

Boston, which normally suffers from a surfeit of mediocre daily newspapers, was suffering from an even worse complaint: no newspapers at all for the past three weeks. All six city dailies* had been struck by the mailers, the essential musclemen who get the papers from the press to the delivery truck. Though they are affiliated with the tough, conservative International Typographical Union, the Boston mailers struck independently for higher wages, hoping to build up their bargaining position against the day next year when the Boston Globe moves into a new plant where automation will cut down the number of mailers' jobs.

The only out-of-town papers to reach Boston in any quantity were New Hampshire Publisher William Loeb's daily Manchester Union Leader (circ. 48,575) and Sunday News (40,000). Neanderthal Republican Loeb (TIME, May 20), who frequently vents his spleen in terrible-tempered Page One editorials, e.g., an attack on President Eisenhower headed "Dopey Dwight," happily stepped up his press runs to 90,000 daily and 100,000 on Sunday and reported a sellout. The Boston-published Christian Science Monitor, which has a separate verbal contract with the mailers, was unaffected by the strike. After a 14-day interval in which it cautiously banned street sales within 30 miles of Boston, the Monitor last week resumed distribution in the city, but it did not have the press capacity to boost its normal newsstand quota.

To fill the void, Boston radio and TV stations hired laid-off reporters and beefed up their newscasts, but still were without the legmen to give listeners more than fragmentary local news coverage. An outdoor advertising company teamed with WBZ-TV and WNAC-TV to spread an outsize Page One across two Boston Common billboards twice daily. Some of the most enterprising makeshift newspapers were put out for employees by Boston insurance companies. American Mutual Liability Insurance published a multilith bulletin under the slogan: ALL THE NEWS

WE COULD GET OUR HANDS ON! New

England Mutual Life Insurance Co. called its tightly packed offset paper The Spare Wheel ("For Use in Emergencies Only"), noted on Page One that its 30-odd news items a day, "unless otherwise indicated, are furnished via the international wires of the United Press."

In Detroit, after a weeklong, citywide newspaper strike, the independent Mailers' Union agreed to go back to work after Teamsters Union Vice President James R. Hoffa flew back from Washington (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) to negotiate a settlement. The mailers, locked in a jurisdictional dispute with the I.T.U., had closed all three Detroit papers with support from Hoffa's teamsters.

*Hearst's morning Record and evening American, the Herald, Traveler, morning and evening Globe.

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