Rags to Riches

Mighty Chicago millionaires have a new breakfast luxury. For $200 a year they may buy the Chicago Daily Tribune on fine, white, imperishable rag paper. Even the most ostentatiously rich, however, are expected to avail themselves sparingly of this luxury. The rag paper edition will go principally to libraries and record rooms where permanent files are a crying need.

In 30 years the ordinary newspaper is crumbled, cracked, useless with age, even if unthumbed. Rag paper issues will last indefinitely, longer than any paper substance except parchment. A year ago Adolph S. Ochs's New York Times, leader, in many aspects, of all the journals of the land, conceived the rag paper notion and prints a limited supply each day. (See p. 7.) The Patterson-McCormick Chicago Tribune, self-styled "World's Greatest Newspaper," felt called upon to offer a similar service to millionaire subscribers and posterity.

Nerves

Newspapers depend on the telephone perhaps more than any industry for the swift transmission of their business. Newspapermen, often harried frantic in attempts to get the office or the information centre of a story close to edition time, were quick to pick up last week a brief story about Harry Kaufman, leading Elk. Mr. Kaufman, lacking a nickel, became infuriated because he could not attract central's attention from a Manhattan pay station booth. He wrenched off the mouthpiece; twisted the receiver hook; all but tore the box from the wall.

Home-town Boy

"His imperial majesty, the Shah [of Persia] was to turn the first shovel of earth. At the same hour and minute . . . signals were to be conveyed to the governor generals of the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, who, representing the king of kings, were to go through the same ceremony in their respective domains. . . . The date . . . was not an auspicious one because the moon was not in its proper phase and the work was set back two weeks and a day."

These sentences are not, although style and substance would suggest such an hypothesis, a translation of the passage in which Herodotus describes the ceremony with which King Xerxes inaugurated his building of the first bridge across the Hellespont. They are, instead, excerpts from a letter which John H. O'Connor, 28, onetime citizen of Columbus, Ohio, now in charge of constructing the first railroad in Persia, despatched to his mother, Mrs. J. W. O'Connor, in Columbus, Ohio. It was printed inconspicuously in the Ohio State Journal.

Nearly everybody recalls such letters in the native press; letters from missionaries, letters from soldiers; letters from tourists struggling to describe in words that the hometown will understand 77 wonders of another world. Occasionally they contain a real news story. John H. O'Connor's did. The inauguration* of construction work on the first Persian railroad, which will connect the capital, Teheran, with the Persian Gulf, is an event of which many internationally minded U. S. citizens are unwillingly ignorant.

Animals

Animal man has an insatiable curiosity about animals which are not man. The invariable fascination of animal oddities cropped up in many news columns last week:

In New York suburbs ravished chicken coops were called to police notice. After a headlong chase intrepid guardians shot a coyote, small craven of the dog tribe normally found on western plains. Twelve slaughtered turkeys in another suburb roused another chase. A prairie wolf, nine months old, was shot.

In Vancouver, B. C. a white leghorn hen was sold for $500. She had laid 230 eggs in 234 days.

In Jacksonville, Fla. the S. P. C. A. complained because a resident left an alligator in an open tank during the cold spell and ice froze on its back. The judge rejected the complaint on the grounds that an alligator is not an animal.

In Lexington, Ky. five rattlesnakes were killed. Into their den at the University of Kentucky a small rat was introduced, prospective meal for the snakes. Sleepy, the reptiles forgot their supper. Hungry, the rat attacked the snakes; killed all of them.

* The inauguration occurred at Ahwaz, on the bank of the Karum river, opposite Moin's Garden.