The News

Last week was one of those weeks when there was very little sensational news. For six days the New York Times, which never tries to "sell" the news by dressing it up in big headlines, had nothing bigger on its front page than a two-column head. It was the kind of week when city editors beat the bushes for crime stories--and find them.

New York had two bigtime holdups within 24 hours. In Boston, Alfred Parkhurst, son of Harvard University's assistant business manager, went to jail for two years for stealing G.I. students' checks from mailboxes. In Des Moines, pretty Mrs. Opal Dixon was caught after she held up a bank by waving a hypodermic syringe and yelling that it was filled with explosives. It was filled with mouthwash.

Fred Sheppard, 76, of Baltimore, father of 25 children, went to the House of Correction for operating as a fence for a smallfry gang of 11- and 12-year-olds. Farmer Charles Mleynek, of Earlham, Ia, was found dead in his living room, shot by someone who knocked one afternoon at his kitchen door.

Los Angeles police searched for the person who had killed black-haired Elizabeth Short, then defiled and butchered her body and dumped it in a vacant lot. Friends had nicknamed her the "Black Dahlia," which made the crime more piquant. Portland, Ore. was having a crime wave. Taxi drivers, tired of being robbed by patrons, carried guns. A woman was knocked on the head as she entered her automobile. Murders averaged one a week. Three youths were arrested for killing a sea captain and dumping his body over a cliff.

But the world at large, the world of big news, was quiet--as quiet as a farmhouse on a winter afternoon. Was something going on--something more than met the eye? Journalism's nearsighted eyes could not see much of anything. But those who claimed to have the right kind of spectacles reported tremendous activity. They said the devil was as busy as ever--though he was invisible, unheard, and, in fact, to hear most people tell it, nonexistent.

But those who had eyes to see (see RELIGION) could see him working away in the kitchen, as happy as' a literate lark, as busy as a broadminded beaver.

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