Trouble on Park Row

When it appeared on New York newsstands one morning last week, the grey and respectable Journal of Commerce looked as if it had spent a hard night--as indeed it had. The edition was four hours late, full of uneven lines, wrong-font letters and typographical errors. The Journal's printers had not fallen down on the job; they had walked off it.

In other strikes, newspapers have shut down, or resorted to Vari-Type. The Journal of Commerce, oldest (121 years) U.S. business paper and the only New York daily still living on historic Park Row (in the old Pulitzer Building), did neither. Along with 24 other editorial and ad staffers, curly-haired Editor & Publisher Bernard J. Ridder, 35, and his 30-year-old brother Eric, general manager, sat down at the linotype machines and set the type themselves. (They had once been linotype operators as part of their journalistic training.)

They also set a grim front-page editorial that threatened the International Typographical Union with "full utilization of new typesetting processes. [We] feel that the monopolistic and illegal strangle hold of the I.T.U. on the nation's free press can be successfully broken."

By week's end the Journal was setting type on standard linotypes, others fitted with typewriter keyboards, teletypesetters manned by "half a dozen pretty girls," and (for the lengthy stock and commodity tables) photo-engraved typewriting. The Ridders and their amateur printers were tired and grimy, but their now typographically clean paper was almost meeting its deadlines. And the I.T.U. had another 120-point warning that the revolution in printing had come to stay.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.