Toy Beachhead

When Detroit newsmen asked the police to issue new 1949 press cards--usually a routine procedure--they got a surprise. Last week, Harry S. Toy, the squat, eagle-beaked police commissioner who has talked darkly about a "Red revolution in Michigan," said that, to get a press card, every reporter would have to 1) fill out a form listing his press experience, and 2) swear that he was not a member of "any organization affiliated with the Communist Party or Communism."

To the outraged howls that rose from Detroit's city rooms, Toy (known as "Headline Harry") replied that a press-card holder "gets in not only to fires, but to waterworks and the like. There are methods of internal attack. In the event of a war with Russia, attacks internally will be followed by a beachhead in Detroit . . ."

Most newsmen thought that distant hypothetical danger far less than the nearer hint of censorship in Headline Harry Toy's action. Snapped a Detroit Free Press reporter: "It's one of the most ridiculous attempts at censorship that I've ever seen a sawed-off local official pull."

By week's end, Toy seemed ready to retire from his beachhead. "I haven't said," he pussyfooted, "that I would not give out press cards if they do not sign."

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