Not Since Scopes?

To many editors, it had seemed likely to be the most controversial trial since the 1925 Scopes evolution case. And so from all over the U.S. more than 100 reporters, photographers and radio broadcasters had poured into the mill city of Manchester, N.H. to cover the "mercy killing" trial of Dr. Hermann Sander. There were 17 Hearstlings alone, and Hearst's International News Service had set up a teleprinter right in the courthouse basement to flash each fresh sensation. In ten days of court sessions, the press corps filed 1,600,000 words.

But to newsmen covering the Manchester trial, as to many readers of their Page-One stories, the controversy and the drama had ended with the cross-examination of the first witnesses. The defense contention that Mrs. Borroto was dead when Dr. Sander injected air into her veins (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) had virtually eliminated the great moral issue that had stirred up the original excitement. "Our biggest problem," wailed one reporter last week, "is to give managing editors the kind of story they want"--a story that was no longer really there.

Cake Batter. Nobody was working any harder to do it than Hearstling Pro Tern Fannie Hurst. Novelist Hurst, 60, wore a life-sized enamel calla lily, a jade ring as big as a crow's egg, and a jade-and-gold bracelet so heavy that she had to take it off to type her stories. Her journalistic style was equally flamboyant. She mixed metaphors as vigorously as a housewife mixing cake batter: "Even more than the cloak-and-dagger, who-done-it crime of 'grand passion,' the motives here involved strike, straight as the crow flies, into the innards, the vital organs and the muscles known as the human heart." Fannie interviewed fruit vendors and drugstore cowboys, lined up at 6 a.m. with spectators waiting to get into the courtroom.

(Hearst's Boston American headlined her story: WOMEN THRILL TO CHILL OF KILL.)

Novelist John O'Hara, also a special for Hearst, found the going tougher. For one day, he was reduced to telling how a reporter had lost a squabble over a seat in the crowded court; he neglected to mention that the reporter was O'Hara. Hearst-ling Inez Robb, doing her usual breezy job, apologized to her readers for one omission: she had felt she must leave the courtroom when the autopsy testimony got too grisly. Reporter Robb was also the source of some innocent merriment in Manchester; townspeople tittered at the big-city blue tint of her grey hair. But Manchesterites were not amused when Correspondent Nicolas Chatelain of Paris' Le Figaro patronizingly observed that Manchester's French Canadians speak a quaint "17th Century" French. One of the local pastors denounced Chatelain as just "a former dishwasher," and a French-Canadian society lodged a formal protest with the French consul in Boston.

At a press party given by the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, Hearst's Bob Considine did little better; he drew only frozen stares with a wisecrack about 10-cc syringes. Hard-bitten Reporter James Kilgallen also stopped a Manchester dowager cold with his definition of how to pronounce his name: "Kill gallon, madam. Like booze."

22 Columns. Day after day, the longest report on the Sander case was turned in by the Boston Post's John S. Mannion. A shorthand adept, he filed 8,000 words daily and in one edition alone the Post devoted 22 columns to the trial. Probably the best dispatches were being filed by big, bluff Joseph Driscoll, national correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who made no attempt to puff up sensations, merely wrote clearly and simply of what was going on.

In the news lulls, some reporters went farther afield. The United Press's Science Editor Paul Ellis even telephoned a Maine cancer specialist for a long-distance discussion of the case (which one paper headlined: WHAT IS DEATH?).

But, so far, none of the reporters in Manchester had come even close to equaling the memorable coverage of the Scopes trial by the Baltimore Evening Sun's H. L. Mencken. After 24 years, Mencken's stories still evoked the sights, the sounds, the sweat and the passion of the Scopes case as if it had happened last week.

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