Word: truck
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Pressure. The heart of the truckers' case was an apparent effort by the rails to block interstate trucking in the heavily industrial Northeast by erecting a "Chinese wall'' around Pennsylvania. The wall was Pennsylvania's 45,000-lb. limit on truck loads, second lowest in the U.S. and at least 13,000 Ibs. under surrounding states. Though the Pennsylvania legislature in 1951 boosted the limit to 60,000 Ibs., Governor John Fine vetoed the bill largely because of pressure brought to bear by ostensibly grass-roots citizens' organizations for tax reform and highway safety...
Propaganda. The Byoir agency's specialty was to plant anti-truck articles, which carried the bylines of top free-lance writers. Evidence was presented that Byoir helped write or research truc's stories in Harper's and the Saturday Evening Post. The agency admitted paying $500 to the author of "The Giants That Wreck Our Highways," which ran in Everybody's Digest; a film based on another Byoir-inspired article appearing in 1952 went out to small-town theaters under the production banner of the "Farm Roads Foundation." The film credits mention neither Byoir Associates...
Byoir admittedly paid the costs of news releases, sent out under the letterheads of the "Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors" and the Pennsylvania State Grange, attacking the bill to raise the weight limit. Byoir edited anti-truck speeches for the P.S.A.T.S.'s secretary, claimed credit for working with the Grange "to set up a special program to contact senators in doubtful counties...
...immune to back-alley tactics. Judge Clary noted that their public relations firm. Manhattan's Allied Public Relations Associates. Inc.. "attempted in a limited degree to use the Byoir technique of phony organizations to attack the railroads." But he added that "wiser heads" in the Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association called a halt to the program...
Ideal Toy Corp. thundered into round-the-clock production with a sleek new $4.98 "Satellite Launcher/' complete with rotating radar tracking station, which can fire four plastic disks 75 ft. into space. Another gadget: a $7.98 "Sky Sweeper Truck." which beams searchlight silhouettes of jet planes against a wall, shoots them down with two "Nike" rockets. In seven days Ideal shipped out 100,000 Satellite Launchers, another 50,000 Sky Sweeper trucks. "This may be a propaganda blow to the U.S.," cried an Ideal executive...