Street Fight

On busy Los Angeles streets, newsboys stand precariously among onrushing autos to hawk afternoon papers to motorists at the traffic lights. Result: in ten years, 17 newsboys have been killed, 283 injured. To stop the slaughter, Los Angeles' city council, pushed by the P.T.A., safety organizations and fearful drivers, finally proposed an ordinance last month to make the newsboys stay on the sidewalk.

The up & coming 5-c- tabloid Mirror, which claims its circulation has risen from 161,188 to 193,924 in the last six months, plumped in favor of the ordinance. But Hearst's Herald & Express (circ. 348,543), figuring that the law might cost it some 12,000 daily street sales, denounced the whole thing as just a Mirror plot.

Last week, when the ordinance came to a vote, the Her-Ex's public-relations director, Ross Marshall, rose with some ingenious, if irrelevant, arguments against it, e.g., that while several hundred newsboys had been injured in the streets, 30,923 other children had been injured during the same period in the relative safety of school playgrounds. Hooted a spokesman for the Teamsters Union: "[The Hearst interests] are fighting to keep animals from being used for medical vivisection but resisting any moves to protect newspaper boys from being killed and maimed." Los Angeles' councilmen unanimously approved the measure. Said one: "It would have been like voting for sin to oppose it."

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