Worcester in Europe

During the night, a French Communist had crudely painted "U.S. Go Home" on a shuttered store front in Montmartre. The next morning an American newsman named Louis Fontaine set up his portable tape recorder beside the sign. He asked passers-by what they thought of it. Most of them did not know what the English words meant. A few did.

"Abominable!" snorted one woman. A Frenchman, who had once lived in New Orleans, agreed. But a milkman, stopping his horse-drawn wagon at the curb, said with a shrug, ''Ben oui. We got along without them before, we can get along without them now."

How People Live. Fontaine, 39, has been collecting opinions for his Main Street Europe program for the past seven months. In 15 European countries he has asked questions of men in the street and has paid his bills with $10,000 raised in Worcester, Mass, by the town's colleges (Worcester Tech, Clark, Holy Cross, Assumption), labor councils (C.I.O. and A.F.L.), industries, women's clubs and church groups. Says Fontaine: "This isn't a Government thing, I'm not even trying to sell America. What it is is the people of an American city trying to find out how the people of Europe live. What they think. How much things cost. Who rules the roost at home. What they think of America."

Fontaine hoped to do his job in three months. It has taken him more than twice that long because he tried to get European opinions in English. Finding the common man on the Continent who speaks English was not easy ("Only the people who deal businesswise with Americans and English--that is, who have something to gain--have retained the English they learned in school").

Last week Fontaine landed in New York for talks with network executives before returning to Worcester, where his program will begin over station WTAG later this month. His listeners will hear a Copenhagen housewife admitting that "Danish husbands haven't entirely forgotten the tradition of the Vikings--they're never ones to help with the dishes"; a Belgian restaurateur complaining that American students "all sit around with their feet on chairs"; and an 18-year-old Dutch boy saying, dispiritedly: "I don't believe in God, and that's true of more than one-third of the Dutch."

Seedlings & Bulbs. Worcester is even gaining materially from Fontaine's trip: Boy Scouts in Stockholm are sending 1,000 pine seedlings this spring to Boy Scouts in Worcester; Dutch tulip growers flew 250 bulbs to Worcester where they have been planted in the city common. The Vienna Choir Boys dedicated a lullaby to Worcester; and Louis Barthe, chef at Maxim's in Paris, invented a new dish called langue de boeuf `a la Worcester (recipe: soak beef tongue for six days in bay leaves, then boil and serve with a heavy port wine sauce).

Reporter Fontaine has not always been welcome. He was able to talk to Communist workers at the Renault plant outside Paris only by pretending to be a Swedish journalist. During the Communist Peoples Congress for Peace in Vienna, he had to set up shop next to a Russian tank monument before the suspicious delegates would let themselves be interviewed. But in all his wanderings, he ran into censorship only once: SHAPE public relations officers refused to let him interview allied soldiers on the difference between European and U.S. army pay. Says Fontaine: "They told me that was dynamite."

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