Word: flora
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Lettered across the front window of the Flora, Ill. Sentinel (circ. 2,500) is a proud slogan: "A free press, a free nation." Like many another country editor, stocky, aggressive Charles Allen Crowder writes almost all the stories in his twice-weekly Sentinel himself; his wife Dorothy and their 15-year-old son Charles Jr. (whose column is called "Crowder's Chowder") do the rest. In reporting the news of Flora (pop. 6,000) and Republican Clay County, Republican Editor Crowder says he sometimes "plays up what the business interests want played down...
Last January, 48-year-old Editor Crowder, a lawyer who switched to journalism four years ago, was handed the hottest issue of his newspaper career. Employees of the Flora Municipal Light & Water System joined the A.F.L. Electrical Workers, and asked the City Council to recognize them as a union for collective bargaining. When the council refused, 19 employees went on strike. The Sentinel declared itself editorially neutral in the dispute, promised to report "both sides" in its news columns...
That was too much for six Flora businessmen. They organized a syndicate to buy up the mortgage on Crowder's newspaper plant. When Crowder went to the bank with $800 in back payments, he learned that his mortgage had been sold for $8,500 to "my worst enemies." The syndicate, headed by Oilman E. D. Given, promptly slapped a judgment on Crowder's property, and the sheriff tried to seize the press...
...Strings. Refusing to surrender it, Crowder raised a loud editorial cry of "suppression." Agreed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "The tactics of dictatorship . . . What is being done to the Sentinel will be resented wherever there is a decent respect for freedom of speech and press." Flora union members and other citizens chipped in $3,000 to a "Save the Sentinel" fund. But Crowder needed $5,000 more...
...does Professor Edward S. Deevey explain it all? Well, says he, during the fourth glacial age the flora and the fauna of England and of Ireland, which at that time were part of the European continent, took the cold and perished. Then the ice melted and the sea rose isolating Ireland and England. Fast moving little hedgehogs, shrews and stoats came galloping from Europe to Ireland across a narrow bridge of land before the sea closed in. As for the slower snakes, they got only as far as England. And that, should the professor be right, was no better than...