Buried News

The Press last week could not decide whether it had at hand a story of the decade or no story at all. What it seemed to think it had was the discovery of a 3,000-year-old civilization in Kentucky. The Chicago Daily News had sent Reporter Robert J. Casey to view some diggings at Wickliffe, Ky. Thence he wired excited reports of "The American equivalent of Tutankhamen's tomb"; "evidence that a people had mastered the elements of community life and government while Babylon ruled the known world"; ". . . its mystery is one with Angkor and Karkemish. . . ." By every definition of news such a report, if true, should have been splashed across every front page in the land. The Daily News did front page it, but under modest two-column headlines. The rest of the Press, including the New York Times, seemed undecided, gingerly tucked it in inside pages but quoted many of Reporter Casey's extravagances.

The story told how a Paducah, Ky. lumberman named Fain W. King found the burial mounds such as are common in Kentucky and Ohio. In one of them he discovered "1,000 skeletons," flint arrowheads, bits of metal that may have indicated a traveling and trading people. But the basis for the "3,000-year-old" guess, the delineation of civilization and culture, were obscure. No archaeologist of standing could last week be located to say whether the Wickliffe diggings were a "buried city" or another Indian burial ground.

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