Three-Day Dimout

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia heaved a sigh and said: "I'm glad it's over. Now we can read the funnies." For three days a delivery strike had imposed a news dimout on the biggest newspaper town in the nation, completely shutting off distribution of all Greater New York's leading dailies.*

Thousands of news-hungry New Yorkers walked to newsplants to buy papers which were put out each day, in reduced numbers, for cash-&-carry customers. The Times, in the three days, easily sold 100,000 copies over its own doorstep to readers who walked through quiet picket lines. The News, with the city's biggest daily circulation (1,975,000), averaged 50,000 over-the-counter sales a day.

Only the Brooklyn Eagle, the Bronx Home News, the Morning Telegraph, a racing sheet and PM, a cross between a tabloid and a magazine, came out during the strike. PM did not capitalize on the situation by turning itself into a real newspaper, but succeeded in quadrupling its 150,000 circulation by being the only paper on most stands and offering a pro forma digest of the other papers' chief comics and columns. (Sample: "Westbrook Pegler: He's still yammering about 'union racketeers'; George Sokolsky: He's not worth quoting either.") The city was forced to depend for most of its news on radio stations, which expanded newscasts and quoted from comics and columnists.

Strike's cause was the Newspaper & Mail Deliverers Union's demand for, among other things, a pledge that none of its members would lose their jobs if the newspapers had to curtail because of newsprint rationing, etc. Strike's end came when the War Labor Board stepped in, ordered strikers back to work pending arbitration.

* Times, Herald Tribune, Daily News, Mirror, World-Telegram, Post, Sun, Journal-American, Wall Street Journal, Journal of Commerce, plus Brooklyn Citizen and Long Island Star-Journal.

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