In New York: Miss Lonelyhearts Many Times Over

By -- Donald Morrison

Dear Action Line:

One night while I was watching the Late Show--I always watch the Late Show while I'm doing my ironing, ever since I started getting these terrible shooting back pains if I ironed during As the World Turns, just like the pains my older sister used to get before they operated on her varicose veins--anyway, this guy comes on during the Late Show and he's demonstrating the Miracle Vegetronic. You know, the one that slices, dices, cubes, chops, grates, shoestrings and shaves a tomato so thin you can read a newspaper through it? Well, I sent in my $10.27 plus postage and handling to Fly-by-Day Enterprises, P.O. Box 18,274, Ocean View, Kans., and it's been seven years now and I haven't heard. Can you help me?

Mrs. J.A., Nader Heights

Dear Mrs. J.A.:

You are in luck. Action Line has just returned from the first national Action Line Conference, sponsored by the Corning Glass Works in Corning, N.Y., a graceful old mill town tucked, as one company official puts it, "in the valley of sand and imagination." Action Line met more than 100 fellow problem-solving columnists--who are also known as Mr. Fix-It, Mr. Action, Call for Action, Action for You, Help Desk, Hotline, Tell It to George and other reassuring names--as well as assorted government and industry consumer-movement watchers.

In Corning, Action Line learned that since the first such column appeared in the Houston Chronicle in 1961, the idea has spread to some 400 papers, from the New York Daily News (circ. 2 million, the nation's largest) to the mighty Logansport (Ind.) Pharos-Tribune (circ. 16,502).

And not a moment too soon. As life and fine print grow more complicated, all those champions of the downtrodden, avengers of the defrauded and writers of wrongs find themselves very much in demand. Last year Action Line columns answered more than 2 million complaints. Action Lines unmask unscrupulous repairpersons, humble haughty bureaucrats, chasten heartless computers, stay the hands of overeager credit companies, track lost merchandise to the ends of the zip-coded universe and locate spare parts for Polish-built refrigerators. They are the new Miss Lonelyhearts, multiplied many times over. As White House Consumer Adviser Esther Peterson told them, "You are a growth industry. I salute you for raising the awareness of the public."

Action Lines in attendance also raised their own awareness. They learned that mail-order merchandise is the most common target for complaints (followed by automobiles, home repairs, government agencies, utility companies, landlords and retail stores). The columnists were only dimly aware of the magnitude of the mailorder problem until their get-together. Then passing mention of the phrase "five towels for a dollar" sent a tidal wave of groans across the hall.

The consumer helpers were also only dimly aware of each other until the conference. "These people are so damn excited to see each other that they stay up most of the night talking," reported a bleary-eyed Ken Rashid, an official of the federal Consumer Products Safety Commission. In the bars, halls and hospitality suites of the Corning Hilton, Action Lines told each other their troubles. Not their troubles, mind you, but other people's.

Robbie Fidler, 25, who writes the Manhattan (Kans.) Mercury's What About It? column, recalls a woman who ordered 1,000 African night crawlers from a Texas worm farm. Lost in the mail, came the complaint. "It's interesting to think that nobody would have noticed 1,000 night crawlers loose in the mail," she muses. Fidler traced them, and found they had not been sent. After several calls, the wife of the proprietor finally blurted tearfully that her husband had left on a business trip some weeks earlier and never returned. Fidler decided that problem was beyond her jurisdiction.

George Appleton, who runs the Nashville Banner's Help Desk column, is most concerned about missing persons. He once helped an old Eskimo woman in Alaska trace her son and daughter to Nashville two decades after the mother found herself helpless and separated from her family following an accident that left her a double amputee living on welfare. Not all such stories end happily. One holiday season Appleton successfully traced an aging Nashville woman's long-strayed son to North Carolina, but the son did not want to see his mother. "She took it poorly," Appleton says sadly. "I should have waited until after Christmas to tell her."

The line between a routine consumer complaint and a personal problem of soap-opera complexity can be as thin as newsprint. When Don Sockol of the Providence Journal-Bulletin's Action Line tried to help a women's softball team find money to pay for $350 worth of warmup jackets after the sponsor backed out, Sockol ended up mediating a personality conflict between the coach and the sponsor, who agreed to return. Sockol also helped heal a festering labor dispute at a local mill when he got union leaders to talk to management officials about who would pay the life-insurance benefit of a worker who died during the strike (they split it fifty-fifty, then settled their other differences as well). Herb Brown, the Atlantic City Press's Mr. Action, called in the city's most respected roofer to examine a shoddy roof job that a reader complained about, and found himself in the middle of a family squabble. The job had been done by the roofer's nephew. "You can quote me on this," the elder man told Brown, who did just that. "The kid is incompetent. He doesn't know what he is doing."

The conferees heard university professors lecture on the Action Line concept. ("Conversely, where one cannot rely on the power of the third-party intervenor, alienation appears to increase.") They made some Action Line merit awards, started a newsletter and planned next year's second annual Action Line Conference, this time without Coming's benign sponsorship.

And there was a lot of serious talk about why alienation appears to decrease where one can rely on the third-party intervenor, i.e., why Action Lines are so popular. "Poor people have services provided," theorized Rita Levine of WELI'S Call for Action in Hamden, Conn. "Rich people can buy them. People in the middle get squeezed. They feel impotent in the corporate marketplace. They complain, get rebuffed and figure, Why bother? Well, we bother for them."

The assembled Action Lines claimed a high solution rate--typically, three out of four problems they tackle--and a few recounted triumphs that would help win a district attorney reelection. Herb Brown says he has run unscrupulous hearing-aid salesmen out of New Jersey, and aided in the conviction of a fraudulent home repairer on 17 counts of embezzlement. Sharon Tucker of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune's Hotline column helped a woman settle out of court with an auto mechanic who had charged $384 for a transmission job advertised at $22.95.

Why do news organizations have to do this work? Where are the fuzz and the feds when you need them? "I'd never fool with the government," Appleton advises inflamed citizens. "Too slow. By the time they get around to solving a problem, the guy has either solved it himself or died." No exaggeration, that. Here is how the Providence Journal-Bulletin had to answer E.M. of Cranston, R.I., who had complained that the Social Security people were giving him the runaround: "Sadly, we are writing this answer to E.M.'s widow. (See story on Page A-l.)"

You might think that Action Line reporters who spend their days sifting through the dust heap of human woe become as cynical and hard-bitten as their colleagues on, say, the police beat or the obit desk. Not at all. "I take every letter personally," sighs Manhattan's Fidler. "I can't go to lunch, I can't go home, I can't sleep until I've solved it." Nashville's Appleton has a fat file marked BIG K (for kooks) groaning with the barely legible, highly paranoid ramblings of the city's loneliest losers; he answers their missives with phone calls in hopes that they can better explain themselves viva voce. Says he: "I'm always afraid that somewhere in there a guy has a real problem, and maybe I'm his last resort."

Some of the war stories that wafted on the early-autumn Corning air were painfully autobiographical. Marilyn Bereson of public TV's Consumer Survival Kit had so much trouble with her car that she declared publicly at another consumer conference that she would never again buy a General Motors product. A GM executive from Detroit called soon after to solve her problem. And there is the case of Esther Peterson, the nation's highest-ranking consumer-affairs official. An unfunny thing happened to her on the way to the Action Line Conference. She showed up at the Commuter Airlines counter at Washington National Airport, with ticket in hand and a confirmed reservation on the day's only flight to the Elmira, N.Y., airport, which serves Corning. You can guess what happened.

Dear Action Line..

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