On the Range

Gilbert (pop. 3,500), on the Mesabi Range of Minnesota, is a town without visible means of support. Its three iron mines are closed. Most of its employed inhabitants are on the public payroll, supported by local taxes on the closed mines. Some 175 are on WPA. The village employs another 150 as policemen, firemen, street cleaners, librarians. The school board gives jobs to 55 teachers, some 200 janitors (one for every three pupils), each of whom works three to ten days a month. The Gilbert Herald is supported by $4,000 of public printing work.

Boss of all these jobs and thus of the town's livelihood is sleek, youngish Village Clerk Frank Indihar, who also has an insurance business. His brother, Anthony, is deputy village clerk and president of the Board of Education. Last week Minnesotans heard of strange doings in Gilbert.

Before the State Board of Education had appeared Dr. William Card, onetime teacher at University of Wisconsin, now an organizer of the American Federation of Teachers. Dr. Card complained that spectacled, able young high-school teacher Stanley McMahon, president of a new teachers' union, and Union Member James Rowbottom had been fired from their Gilbert school jobs. Since 1931, said he, Gilbert's school board has fired 50 teachers "to make room for horsetrading and political favors." He found that all the Range towns had a teacher exchange system "more or less on the plan of 'you hire the daughter of the president of our school board and we'll hire the cousin of your superintendent's wife's friend.' " The American Federation of Teachers also investigated the case of hapless Harold Sivula, Gilbert high-school teacher. Mr. Sivula, when he arrived in Gilbert, went to board in a house recommended by the school-board president. His wife's baby was delivered by a doctor on the school board. Warned by a friend that he was trading at the wrong grocery, he changed stores. Nevertheless, he lost his job. after he had made himself ineligible to vote by moving from one ward to another on the eve of an election, against the advice of a school-board member.

After hearing Dr. Card, the State Board of Education sent to Gilbert and other school districts of the State a rebuke for whimsical and discriminatory firing, the board scolded: "If we would not dismiss a hired hand from a farm or a clerk from a store without adequate cause, we must not expect to do so in the teaching profession and still get good teaching."

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