Boston Payroll

Like other newsmen, sportswriters must keep in close touch with their sources. Last week the Providence Journal-Bulletin told how ten Boston sportswriters got too close. In a Page One exclusive story, the Journal-Bulletin revealed that ten men on Boston sports staffs were also on the payroll of the Salem (N.H.) Rockingham Park race track.

The sportswriters, said the track's manager, were paid from $100 to $2,500 last year for services ranging from "not doing a damn thing" to helping out in the publicity department. The payroll was discovered by the Journal-Bulletin as a result of a state investigation on whether the track could afford to pay higher taxes. Organizer of the sportswriters working for the track: Hearst's Boston Record Columnist Dave Egan, who doubled as Rockingham's pressagent at more than $5,000 a year. It was Egan who had arranged for the reporters, including six other staffers of the morning Record and its sister afternoon paper, the American, to be paid by the track.

Several days before the Journal-Bulletin story broke, the Associated Press fired its Boston bureau's veteran (29 years) sportswriter, William R. King, who was on the payroll for $500. The United Press "accepted the resignation" of its Boston bureau manager, Gardner L. Frost, a U.P. employee for 17 years, who got $500 last year from the track. The Boston Post, whose track reporter was on the list, said that he was not an employee of the paper but a "private contractor who sells a racetrack service to the Post." Hearst's American and Record replied that they saw nothing wrong with their staffers earning extra money so long as "they do their own jobs." But A.P. General Manager Frank Starzel took a much stricter view. Said he: "We deem it wholly untenable for any staff member to receive anything of value from news sources . . . Each staff member must hold himself aloof from any [such] entanglement."

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