The Haulers' Christmas

For the twelfth straight day, 8,000,000 New Yorkers went without their daily papers. The strike of 4,400 deliverymen had laid a high cost on the nine newspapers--and on the city. Of some 20,000 newspaper employees, fewer than 5,000 were working. The papers totted up total losses of $1,000,000 a day in advertising revenue and another $400,000 daily in circulation revenue.

Without newspaper advertising, major department store sales in one big Christmas shopping week fell nearly $3,000,000 below last year, and specialty store sales dropped $1,250,000. Impulse and mailorder sales--both directly responsive to newspaper ads--were down even more sharply. In desperation, some Manhattan merchants pasted ads in subway coach windows--at $2,000 a day for four displays in each car--or bought space in neighborhood papers, e.g., the Greenwich Village Villager, which was not affected by the strike. On 42nd Street, Stern's department store installed eight pretty girls in show windows to chalk sales specials on blackboards, got so much response that the girls may be used even after the newspapers are back. Radio station WMCA began selling retail announcements on a half-hour program hitherto devoted to public service, sold all available time 48 hours in advance.

Of all the radio and TV stations that tried to fill the news gap by extended coverage, the best job was done by a radio station tied to a good newspaper--the New York Times's WQXR. Department editors went on the air to read stories; other staffers chatted conversationally among themselves on topics of the hour. Taped interviews with Timesmen overseas gave listeners a Timeslike ration of international affairs. Every day Theodore M. Bernstein, the Times's able, shirt-sleeved assistant managing editor, patiently and expertly filled for his audience, column by column, an imaginary Times Page One--and emerged as a radio personality in his own right.

The Missing Pages. Expanded radio and TV coverage could only skim along the peaks of the news, leaving unchronicled, among other things, the inside-page happenings of the community. Many a forlorn Manhattan miss lost the opportunity to exhibit her face, or at least the fact of her engagement or marriage, to her neighbors. Many an executive, promoted as the New Year approached, made the ascent unnoticed. For want of want ads, the unemployed lost job opportunities, apartments stayed unrented, dogs stayed lost. Men were convicted or acquitted without public attention, the scores of sports events went unreported, Christmas charities were hard put to make their appeals heard. And many a citizen whose passing would have been noted on the obituary pages--even if it had to be by a paid notice--died known only to his friends.

All during the strike's second week, neither side budged an inch toward settlement. Management sat tight on its original $7 package offer--a $4-a-week raise next year, $3 more in 1960--which it had already contracted to give to the American Newspaper Guild. The deliverers' union, having repudiated its leaders by striking in the first place, rejected them again last week by shouting down a recommendation from President Sam Feldman and the negotiating committee to vote again on the publishers' offer. Feldman and his committee sat back in helpless frustration. "The union's an anarchy," said Stephen Vladeck, former union counsel. "It's riven with politics."

Reporters Sorting Mail. By week's end the tough and truculent deliverymen, semiskilled workers who had forced printers, engravers and writers off the payrolls, were going it very much alone. No help, or offers of help, came from the nine other unions indirectly involved in the strike. When the paper haulers appealed to the other unions for a "mutual aid pact," they were coldly rebuffed. There was little sympathy in any quarter for the deliverymen. who can gross as much as $250 a week--against a base pay of $104--by taking extra jobs, working extra shifts, and by charging newsstand dealers for "insurance" against such hazards as truck damage to their kiosks or bundles dropped in the gutter.

For some 15,000 newsmen and mechanical-department workers off the job without pay, perhaps the worst aspect of the strike was the sight of printers, journalists and other skilled workers reduced, in the week before Christmas, to part-time work at the post office, sorting Christmas mail.

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