Hard Times by Studs Terkel

Author:Studs Terkel [Terkel, Studs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2011-09-19T22:00:00+00:00

Editor and Publisher

Fred Sweet

During the last years of the Depression, he was editor and publisher of the Mount Gilead Union-Register. The town in central Ohio had a population of 2,500.

OH, GOD, one of the reasons I went broke is that a farmer would say: “I want to put an ad in the paper. I had to sell the place off.” He had so many head of Jersey cattle and a baler and a tractor and wagon and this and that. At the bottom of the ad, there was always the line: “And other articles too numerous to mention.”

You’d go to the auction and what would you see among the “articles too numerous to mention”? A doll, a couple of books, a basket with the Bible in it, the kids’ wagon. . .. Here you had the whole history of the family in all this junk. People pawing over it and buying it for a penny on the dollar.

I never had the heart—the guy wanted a forty-inch ad. Twenty-five cents an inch. That’s ten bucks, isn’t it? And he always wanted about fifty or a hundred handbills to put on telephone posts and fences. How could you charge a guy who’s dead broke for those extra handbills? You’d feel funny about charging for the ad in the first place.

The paper had 843 subscribers when I took over. When I left, it had about 2,780. It was a great success editorially. But I was running a New Deal paper in a Republican town. The two other papers got the legal advertising. I didn’t have a share of that stuff.

You see, the judge of the Probate Court is a Republican. The law says he’s got to publish certain kinds of ads in two newspapers of general circulation. If he’d been a Democrat, I would’ve gotten a piece of the business, see? But that was only one of the reasons I went broke.

There’s one factory in Mount Gilead at the time. It’s making hydraulic presses for airplane fuselages. 1940—the war’s coming, but it’s still Depression down here. Highly skilled mechanics are working for sixty, seventy cents an hour. In Cincinnati, Cleveland and Toledo, they’re making $2.50.

Into town one day, comes a walking delegate from the union. He says, “I find there’s nobody around here wants to be seen even talking to me. Everybody’s scared.” I said, “The back end of the shop is yours any time you want a bunch of guys to come down here. We’ll pull the shades down and you can sit behind the press down there and nobody will see you.” So our little newspaper office became the center where the plot was laid to organize the company.

The president of the company was the superintendent of the Presbyterian Sunday School. He dominated the whole town. But the men in the plant responded. Pretty soon, the paper was covering the organizing drive. I’m trying to play it right down the middle in the news columns. Every time the union’s got something to say, I’d call up this guy: “Have you got anything to say?” I’d print ’em side by side.

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