Concert In Greenwich

A year ago Mrs. John T. McCullough was occupied mostly in being a Greenwich, Conn. housewife, bringing up her eight-year-old son, raising Boxer dogs, and when she had time, listening to good music. She subscribed, in fact, to a three-concert winter series to be given by the Greenwich Community Concert Association.

When she got a list of the artists who were to appear, Mrs. McCullough was a little put out. The second concert featured Larry Adler, the mouth organist, and Paul Draper, the lissome dancer, and she had read enough about them to conclude that both had been busy supporters of various Communist fronts. Hester McCullough went to the telephone and called several board members of the Greenwich Community Concert Association to protest the idea of presenting artists who mixed their art with politics. Most of the members pooh-poohed her.

"I Deeply Resent." Indignant Hester McCullough called up Igor Cassini of the New York Journal-American, in whose Cholly Knickerbocker column she had read some of the Adler-Draper Red-bordered record. Cassini said the Journal-American would furnish her with information that Adler and Draper supported eight or nine Communist-front organizations. Fortified with the list, she wrote the Association:

"These two men, while fine artists, have been openly denounced in the press as being pro-Communist ... I deeply resent having any money from a community project in this town going into the hands of those unsympathetic to our democracy." Columnist Cassini phoned her and she read him the letter. He printed it. When the editor of the Greenwich Time saw Cassini's column, he also printed the letter. At the invitation of the Greenwich Kiwanis Club, Hester McCullough marched into a luncheon meeting and once again aired her views.

"No" & "Yes." By this time, the commuter-residents of Greenwich (pop. 40,400) were in a genteel uproar. The Greenwich Community Concert Association summoned Adler and Draper before it, asked them if they believed in overthrowing the government by force. "No," they said. Did they believe in making changes by a majority vote? "Yes," they said. That was enough for the Association. The concert went on, Draper danced, Adler played the mouth organ. And they filed a $200,000 libel suit against Hester McCullough.

That was only the beginning of it. Under an old and odd Connecticut law, all the liquid and real assets jointly owned by Mrs. McCullough and her husband, a picture editor of TIME, were forthwith frozen: a $2,000 bank account, a piece of property worth about $7,500, their $65,000 house (mortgaged for $40,000).

Overwhelmed by these workings of the law, unable to touch her capital, Mrs. McCullough wondered how she was going to defend herself. Columnist Igor Cassini rallied to her aid. He appealed to his readers for contributions to the Mrs. John T. McCullough Defense Fund. Westbrook Pegler took up the crusade. So did George Sokolsky, columnist in the New York Sun, Bill Cunningham of the Boston Herald, and Radio Commentator Fulton Lewis Jr. Money came in, mostly in small denominations, from militant sympathizers; $18,000 was collected to help Mrs. McCullough fight her libel case through the federal courts.

So What? The legal fight began. Mrs. McCullough's only defense was to prove that her charges, which many a newspaper had printed without even the threat of a lawsuit, were true. In a Stamford law office, Draper appeared last week to make pre-trial depositions. The net of his statements was that he was not a Communist, did not share the political views of his mother, Dilettante Muriel Draper (now off on a jaunt to Moscow with Mrs. Paul Robeson), and did not accept the Communist-doctrine idea of violent revolution. It was true, he admitted, that he had danced without fee at benefits for organizations which the Attorney General has labeled subversive. Perhaps too, he conceded, his name did appear on some of their letterheads. So what? asked Draper; the fact that the Attorney General had once said the organizations were subversive did not make them so.

Adler, in Europe on a concert tour, is still to be examined. His lawyers indicated that he would just as stoutly deny blowing any Red harmonics. After months of delay, the law was beginning to move. Hester McCullough, with savings and home tied up, pressed determinedly for a trial before judge and jury.

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