The Good Old Song

Allowing itself a brief lapse into professional sentiment, the New York Times took editorial note of the end of the 19-day newspaper strike, which had cost nine New York dailies $30 million. Said the Times: "The sounds dear to the newspaper man's heart, the clattering Linotypes, the thump of the make-up man's mallet, the thunder of the presses, the soft swish of the emerging newspapers: this song will not be silenced."

All nine dailies broke the silence with editions that tried, in one way or another, to make up for lost days. The Daily News brought comic-strip buffs up to date on neglected episodes in the lives of Orphan Annie and Smilin' Jack, handed out free copies of undistributed Sunday-edition comic supplements. The Herald Tribune, which had to wait for the end of the strike to publish an inside story, published it: the resignation of Herald Tribune President and Editor Ogden R. Reid (TIME, Dec. 15), who had postponed his departure until the paper could record it. Lingering effects of the long shutdown were still apparent in the first Sunday editions. With a Page One explanation, the Herald Tribune stuffed three-week-old magazine supplements into its Sunday paper, plus all three color comic sections readers had missed during the strike. The News, too, inserted a Christmasy magazine section two weeks out of date.

As it had promised, the Times tucked a plump, 34-page back-news supplement into an early issue--two pages for each day the paper had been down. The supplement was a blend of hoarded obituaries, old news and old weather reports. Prepared daily while the strike was in progress, stuffed into separate big envelopes (coded Alice, Betsy, Carol, Diana, Edna and so on down through Queenie) against the day publication was resumed, this running rehash avoided the obvious temptation to correct day-to-day judgments in the light of hindsight. On Dec. 27 the Times filed away a story--later proved false--that a transatlantic balloon had landed safely in Venezuela. It would have been easy to replace that story with another before the delayed two-page issue was printed, but the Times resolutely immortalized the false report, published a second story explaining the hoax in the next day's two pages.

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