Afternoon in Connecticut

In Stamford, Conn. (pop. 65,000), as always at noon on a workday, factory whistles tootled and bells rang. But on this sunny day they told more than the time. Men & women left their factory benches and marched toward Atlantic Square, the city's center. Clerks left the stores and joined the marchers. Butchers, bartenders and waitresses doffed their aprons and walked off their jobs.

Soon Atlantic Square was packed by more than 10,000 men & women. They sang The Star-Spangled Banner and Hail! Hail! the Gang's All Here. They shouted and chanted catcalls, cheered the labor leaders who spoke from the Town Hall's steps. They kept it up for two hours, while most business in Stamford stood still.

There was no sign of disorder. It was not an angry crowd. But it was good-naturedly determined to show that it was solidly behind some 3,000 striking A.F. of L. machinists of the Yale & Towne Manufacturing Co. (locks, hardware, radar), Stamford's largest employer.

After two hours of it, the crowd broke up almost as quickly as it had gathered.

Impotent Magic. Inside the Town Hall, company, union and city representatives bickered before 200 listeners. The thorniest issues: Yale & Towne's insistence on a return to the open shop; its refusal to offer any increase except one based on overtime. The 77-year-old Stamford plant had accepted a wartime maintenance of membership contract under protest. Now, labor leaders charged, the company was trying to "bust the union." (Rather than recognize a union, Yale & Towne closed its Detroit plant after a prolonged sit-down strike in 1937.)

The meeting grew hot, hotter. At the side of the packed room, a man climbed on a chair, shouted that he represented the U.S. Government. He did. He was tall, husky Lawyer William Gaston, 47, onetime husband of Cinemactress Kay Francis, now U.S. conciliator for New England. He had a "magic formula." He would meet company and union representatives separately--at once.

Company spokesmen, after hearing Lawyer Gaston's formula, quickly decided that it was nothing but a union checkoff in lamb's clothing. They emerged snorting: "Completely unacceptable . . . that man was very fresh to us." (Two days later Gaston was removed from the Stamford assignment, another casualty among labor-management alchemists.)

Stamford's strange day was significant in the nation's nervous week. In miniature, it offered good evidence of 1) U.S. labor's willingness to walk off the job, no matter the cause or cost; 2) labor's refusal to give up any of its wartime gains.

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