Three Ancient Ladies

Said a solemn statement, published last week in the Communist Daily Worker (circ. 48,601) over the signatures of Chairman William Zebulon Foster and Secretary Earl Browder of the Communist Party: "As of today's issue ... the Daily Worker . . . ceases to be the official central organ of the Communist Party. We believe . . . that the Daily Worker merits and should receive the ... continued . . . support of all American progressives . . . including of course the Communist Party of the U. S. A."

On an inside page the Worker published brief biographies of its new owners, three elderly ladies of respectable New England stock who took title under the name Freedom of the Press Co., Inc. The ladies :

P:Ferdinanda Wesselhoeft Reed, 69, wife of Harvardman Willard Reed, a onetime Unitarian minister, Cambridge schoolmaster. Robust granddaughter of Dr. Robert Wesselhoeft, who went to the U. S. from Germany in 1840, settled in Vermont, Mrs. Reed once sat at the feet of Boston's late great Novelist William Dean Howells; in 1933 she exhibited some of her sculpture at the Chicago World's Fair; only six years ago at 63 she put in half a day's work with a shovel digging Moscow's subway.

P:Susan Homans Woodruff, 71, graduate (1890) of Smith College, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Sprightly, blue-eyed granddaughter of I. Smith Homans, who founded the Bankers' Magazine, Mrs. Woodruff was a schoolteacher for 14 years, bought a farm and sponsored a back-to-the-soil movement in Huntington, L. I. A lecturer on trade unions and women's rights, she has visited Soviet Russia five times to study "the new type of woman."

P:Caro Lloyd Strobell, 81, Illinois-born, graduate of Vassar College in 1881. Wife of a Manhattan schoolmaster, George Strobell, Mrs. Strobell had three ancestors in General Washington's Army. Slight Mrs. Strobell became a Socialist in 1898, was a pioneer in birth-control research, has no children.

Four months ago, the Daily Worker, cornered by the Department of Justice, registered, under protest, as an agent of a "foreign principal." By unloading the Worker on three amiable old ladies, it appeared that the Communist Party might save itself a lot of trouble and perhaps some financial worries (such as the fine for criminal libel recently imposed on the Daily Publishing Co. following a suit by Mrs. Edith Liggett, widow of the Minneapolis publisher killed by gunmen in 1935). In the reflected innocence of New England respectability, the Worker's editors may be able to carry on their work as usual. That the principal object of the sale was to keep the Worker out of trouble was confirmed by Mrs. Woodruff. Said she: "If the Leftists were to be restricted, where could we get our paper?" Said Mrs. Woodruff: "I would like to tell you the whole story frankly, but they told me not to say any more."

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