Crusading Realism

Shortly before dawn one day last week an open roadster was whizzing down Manhattan's West Side Elevated Highway. In the car were three men and two women, all awash with liquor. Blind to a bend in the highway, the joyriding driver sent his machine smashing head-on into the steel railing. Two of the men were catapulted to the street below, instantly killed. One of the girls was also tossed out, badly hurt.

To most New York newspapers, this was just one more automobile accident, to be disposed of in a short colorless story on an inside page. To the New York World-Telegram, it was a chance to front-page a piece of extraordinary reporting. Excerpts from the World-Telegram's account of the accident:

"Sudden death, with heads mashed to pulp and bones snapped like toothpicks, came to two men today. . . . The men and an attractive girl were hurled over the railing to the street 30 feet below. . . .

"The men's heads were split open. One man's skull was mashed down almost to his ears. Blood was splattered five or six feet around them. Blood spurted from their wounds, too.

"The girl, only 18, struck a few feet from the men. Most of her teeth were knocked out. Chunks of flesh were torn from her face. Her pelvis was shattered. The sharp end of a broken bone stuck out of her thigh.

"But she wasn't dead. She lay weakly spitting out teeth and blood. Doctors think she will live. Her face may be twisted with scars despite the surgeon's work. A policeman said she looked as though someone had hit her in the face with a sledge-hammer."

Such journalism on the part of the World-Telegram was a direct development of an article called "--And Sudden Death" by Joseph Chamberlin Furnas published in the August issue of Reader's Digest (TIME, Aug. 12). Using that article's brutally realistic method of shocking motorists into a vivid realization of the physical horror of a bad automobile wreck, the World-Telegram thus became the first important daily to put its newscolumns into the amazing safety crusade which "--And Sudden Death" started two months ago.

Since its publication Reader's Digest has sold more than 1,500,000 reprints of the Furnas article. Magazines, newspapers, the radio have quoted it. Judges have read it aloud to traffic offenders, made them write it longhand or recite it. Wyoming sends it with every set of license plates. The Port of New York Authority gives it to all motorists using the Holland Tunnel or the George Washington Bridge. Copies of it accompany all official correspondence of the Province of Ontario.

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