Pink Reporter

Last week Tip Reynolds was under arrest again, this time in jail. Tip Reynolds came from Michigan. A husky, amiable six-footer, he went to Montana in 1902, when he was 20. A lineman by trade, he spent most of his life electrifying railroads in the West.

Three years ago, at 55, Tip Reynolds started a newspaper. Printed on a violent, near-red shade of newsprint, the Pink Reporter turned out to be a two-fisted, name-calling, muckraking fortnightly. Tip Reynolds first fell afoul of the law when he went after John E. Kennedy, secretary to ex-Congressman Jerry O'Connell (who is now himself a "liberal" publisher). Charged with criminal libel, punishable in Montana by a $5,000 fine or a year in jail, Editor Reynolds hid out for a while in the hills, finally showed up, printed a retraction, and the charges were dropped.

Lately the Pink Reporter had heckled Governor Roy Ayers, who took office four years ago with the blessing of Montana's powerful Anaconda Copper Mining Co. A mild-mannered Lewistown lawyer and Democrat, Governor Ayers enjoys a drink as much as any man.

Said the Pink Reporter recently, "The Ayers tribe are skunky eggs. For instance, Ben Moulton, now a member of the grafting state liquor crooks ... by the grace of a drunken so-called governor, [State Senator] Dale Woods . . . and one L. M. A. Wass . . . are all former chums of Whiskey Ayers, and all just as corrupt, including [State Senator] H. H. 'Haywire' Haight."

Ayers and his friends read these sizzling words, saw pink. The Governor himself swore out and signed a warrant charging that this was criminal libel. Complainants: Governor Ayers, Ben Moulton, Senator Woods, Senator Haight. Tip Reynolds was arrested at Three Forks, taken to Bozeman, 30 miles away, locked up in the Gallatin County jail.

There, last week, Editor Reynolds, in a spacious cell that looked out on one of Montana's traveling gallows, awaited trial. Nobody knows where the Pink Reporter is printed. It has been farmed out to various print shops in Montana, now comes (according to rumor) from a press somewhere in North Dakota. Not a copy was to be found last week on Montana newsstands. But in his cell in Gallatin County jail was a long table covered with pencils and copy paper, and Tip Reynolds at week's end was busily editing his next issue.

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