At Hopewell

In Pop Gebhart's Hotel & Store at Hopewell, N. J. (pop.: 1,467) some 300 newsmen last week set up a field base of operations. The store, the dining room, the back room were filled day and night with reporters, photographers, radio broadcasters. Among them were Arthur Brisbane, William Randolph Hearst Jr., Karl Bickel. Every bed in the hotel's 17 rooms was occupied in shifts. Prices in the town skyrocketed. The meanest lodgings cost $5, ham & eggs 75-c-, applejack 50-c- per glass. Even a few prostitutes moved in, like camp followers, from neighboring towns. Squads of telegraph operators kept up a 24-hour tattoo moving 125,000 press words per day. Those words detailed the biggest newsstory of many a year--the kidnapping of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. (see p. 16).

The advance guard of newsmen made their first headquarters in the Lindbergh garage. Later Col. Lindbergh gave his first and only formal interview: "Please go away." Newsgatherers, pressed back by New Jersey State troopers, retreated from the Lindbergh estate. Thereafter the office of New Jersey's Governor Arthur Harry Moore at Trenton became the clearing house for official announcements. The Governor's secretary, the Governor's library, and the Governor's cigarets were placed at the disposal of the newsmen.

In newspaper offices throughout the land, various things were done with the outputs of the army of newshawks at Hopewell. What appeared in print represented the best and the worst of U. S. journalism. Not only was the story a tabloid's holiday, but even such staid organs as the New York Herald Tribune gave almost their entire front pages and as many as seven inside pages to the news, features and pictures. Some examples:

P: Of all the maps and diagrams of the scene of crime, the best appeared in the New York Sun. Flung across the upper half of its front page was a panoramic view of the Lindbergh estate and vicinity drawn by Harry A. Chandler.

P: The sobbing tabloids were outsobbed by one story from North American Newspaper Alliance. Excerpts: "... Anne Morrow Lindbergh, mother of the stolen mite of humanity, would pay fifty times $50,000 if she possessed as much; for the return of her son. ... She is still fighting . . . discharging the duties of the wife she is and the mother she always will be. The human machine that is her earthly habitat functions, to all appearances, smoothly."

P: The New York Daily News printed a four-day serial editorial, first chapter of which offered this thought: "Christ died, according to the Bible, to atone for the sins of the world. ... Is it possible that this little boy is destined to play some such role in the history of the United States? ... If that comes to pass, this child will not have been taken in vain."

P: In the New York Times two days after the kidnapping, appeared an advertisement for a home ventilating system with a picture of a sleeping child, and these words: "Protect YOUR BABY. . . . Dangers of open nursery windows are gone once you've installed an Airgard. Windows remain sealed tight--LOCKED. . . ."

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