STOP

The small-town railroad telegrapher is a determined member of a dying breed. He sits in a paint-peeling station house, idly fingering silent keys and dreaming of days when fellows such as young Thomas Edison made the vagabond telegrapher a giant among men and a hero to small boys. Times have passed him by, auto mated relay systems have obsoleted him --but the telegrapher hangs on by a finger.

Last autumn, rather than take a strike, the mighty Southern Pacific Co. virtually guaranteed to keep on all of its telegraphers until retirement or death. Last week, refused a similar settlement by the nation's fourth longest railroad, the Chicago & North Western, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Order of Railroad Telegraphers was staging a strike whose impact was felt far beyond the line's 10,702 miles of track.

Supported by the other rail brotherhoods, the telegraphers totally shut down the North Western, forcing its 35,000 Chicagoland commuters onto already clogged freeways. When the North Western stopped rolling, so did two-thirds of Wisconsin's multimillion-dollar paper and pulp industry. In the woodlands of Upper Michigan, cut timber piled high at rail sidings, and lumberjacks knew that layoffs were in the wind. Towering grain elevators were idled in Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin because farmers could not move their crops. Cargill Inc. shut its big soybean processing plant in Chicago, and the manager of its Omaha terminal, Ace R. Cory, muttered, "We're just plain out of business."

Setting the Pattern. For the railroad industry, the North Western strike was likely to prove a turning point. Whatever settlement results from it will go far towards setting a pattern not only for railroad telegraphers but also for all other technologically obsolete railroad employees--including 45,000 "firemen" who ride diesel locomotives on the nation's freight trains and in switching yards.

The telegraphers, 1,000 strong on the North Western, make this demand: no job that existed on Dec. 3. 1957, can be abolished unless the union agrees. "Indefensible featherbedding," snaps North Western Chairman Ben W. Heineman. 48, onetime corporation lawyer who became boss of the road in 1956 and has shoved it intermittently into the black by consolidating lines and eliminating stations, cutting money-losing runs and reducing jobs--including those of 600 telegraphers, who presumably would collect new jobs or plump payoffs if the union wins. A presidential emergency board recommended last June that the telegraphers drop their demand. The union has ignored it.

"The Public Be Damned." The last thing that Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg did before his appointment to the Supreme Court was to plead in vain with the telegraphers not to strike. Last week his successor. W. Willard Wirtz, who used to ride the North Western home from work every day when he was Adlai Stevenson's law partner, was also getting nowhere. At week's end, as Ben Heineman riffled through mounds of letters from his commuters urging him to hold fast, the telegraphers dug in for a long siege. At that point, the liberal Milwaukee Journal was reminded of the arrogant legacy of one of U.S. railroading's 19th century buccaneers, William H. Vanderbilt. Hooted the Journal: "It is now. the railroad telegraphers who say, 'The public be damned.' "

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