European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - April 13, 1945, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Of looks just the some of first but when you inspect it you find fewer More women More go by Georg Meyers yank staff writer just to take a Quick look at the newspaper you got every Day or every week before the War still looks like the same old Hometown for the headlines about the but War changes a even a Home front and the changes Are reflected in the news the local paper you can spot the changes in the pages of every one of the daily and weekly papers published in the the main reason the news has changed is that most of the younger men Are in a War and away from that leaves a hell of a Hole in the local editors try to plug the Hole with the stories they think readers Are most eager to stuff about Hometown a i can make headlines in his Hometown paper on Day and All the other Days in the invasion if he gets a slug through the chair the Hometown Gazette plants his picture where All the neighbors can see it if he squeaks through without a the picture runs anyway because he didst get the editor picks up two pieces of copy from an army Public relations one Story tells about a new lightweight Gas drum that will save millions of cubic feet of shipping space the other mentions that some Hometown Doggie got himself a pfc the editor punks the Gas drum Story into the wastebasket and runs the pfc Sam Sampson writes his Mother from saying he bumped into Joe who used to drive the milk and the whole town reads about the when it began stress ing the however that the Home town i plays in the the press May not have had any conscious notion of bucking up the i or bringing the War Home but there Are editors who claim that the policy serves both those the average they cant help be ing pleased when some body mails him a copy of the Home town paper with his name in the average civilian May have no idea whatever of what the front is but Edi tors say Hes bound to feel a bit closer to the War when he reads that the Guy from across the Street had a rough time at to or and women in uniform from this neck of the their absence hits nearly every aspect of the the Globe covers a big area that gets no other daily so we have to play the War news but local news is still the Backbone of our Reader take the social its All theres almost nothing because there Arent enough men to go weve been giving a lot of space to teenage like the dances at the municipal memorial building where 400 to 500 kids turn out every look at the sports Ironwood used to be a great Winter sports now there Are no More tournaments with the big time skiers jumping Down the big semipro football and baseball Are no the hottest thing left in sports is High school we dont even get the old time run of police court traffic violations Are a and an  Case makes a big Story these the younger High school sprouts dont have a Chance to get in dutch with the family car they cant get and i guess the older men that Are left dont get tanked up in the taverns and whale into each other so then we come to the censorship were not squawking about As Long As we know its doing any but sometimes its a hard thing to explain to our Johnsons favorite example of which is strictly is the time Richard the Pacific air gave a talk at the High school he noticed the girl from the Globe making so when the talk was the major told the of you realize everything i said Here is off the its pretty Johnson for us the townspeople to see How a speech delivered to 500 High school kids can be called off the the Globe Seldom prints an interview with a Are fairly particularly of the dailies sons Orrin and Vincent and daughter Valetta i w Al 4 published in cities of less than Noyes is winding up his second term As president of the american newspaper publishers Assoc a whose membership represents 735 dailies in the United states and in spite of wartime including a slight population decrease shared by cities else where that Are not big War production the Globe has climbed in the last year to its High est this Rise is in line with National figures showing an increase of in circulation of daily papers during 1944 to a total of five staggered by shortages of men and went out of but during the same period 10 new dailies were to newspaper people these figures Are Sig because circulation continues to grow while publishers worry about restrictions on the use of newsprint paper and a nationwide de Cline in which in 1944 averaged percent under the 1943 in daily papers got Only percent As much paper As make up the rest of the so Many men were pulled out of Archbold that the paper is freckled with advertisements of farm sales by families who cant make a go of it with sons and husbands but news of farm crop prospects and livestock marketing still fill a great Many columns in the As is natural in a place where there Are fewer people than there Are Hamp Shire and Poland China hogs and Black Angus and White faced Hereford beef the Archbold paper goes whole hog on every scrap of information it can get about Hometown a regular feature is a column called new Ever time anyone gets a change of address from a the Buckeye runs it so the gis friends can keep track of columns like this and the Ironwood daily globes with the colors Are Standard with All letters from gis to relatives that Are published in these columns Seldom contain much More than such personal observations As id Trade the whole Mediterranean for one cupful of Lake but once in a while a letter comes through that gives the papers readers a More intimate picture of what goes on in a War news Aja your Hometown paper but the sort of stuff they print i their columns is Only a part of the changes the War has brought to the Hometown in for theres a Choice Little red head by the name of Connie Murphy on the daily Shes not yet but for the last two years Connie has been a Globe filling in for Douglas now a sergeant with the 94th infantry in Connie Murphys routine is pretty much the same As Doug tremains was when he was legging the same every morn ing she crosses the Montreal River to the Little nextdoor City of and picks up news at the Iron county court the City Hall and the school superintendents and Back on the Ironwood Side she stops at the grand View Hospital then she hot foots it Back to the globes new looking building on Mcleod Street and bats out her copy in the second floor but the stories that con Nie gets these Days Are different from those tre main wrote before the Edwin who went to work for the Globe 25 years ago and is now its managing Edi explains it this Way there Are men Page 10 the Taylor editor and and Vincent ready the Archbold Buckeye for furlough ing i on his combat weve that most soldiers Clam up on us it we ask what they did in they act As if there scared to As if Treyve been Given instructions to keep their Mouths we dont object to if that the Way it has to but we know were passing up a lot of Good stories that the folks around town would like to see in the Best sources for firsthand stuff about the Hometown gis overseas Are the letters they write relatives run into the news room at All hours of the Day with mail Treyve received from one Battlefront or and the Globe prints All or part of almost every letter brought the letters run in a column called with the a daily feature since the War has carried the pictures of More than gis from go Gebic county on the Mich Igan Side and Iron county in in the Day today grind of getting a paper on the smaller newspapers like the Globe have been hit harder by the manpower shortage than bigger publishing experienced men have been lured from Small papers to More glamorous and sometimes Bette paid jobs on metropolitan forcing the Little sheets fall Back on women or Green Connie for is one of an estimated replacements for the regular staff Adver Tising who Are on the globes staff there Are five women subbing for a byproduct of the manpower shortage is the boy Power it takes 100 Carrier boys to handle the globes circulation of and boys Are hard to this is something especially in we run to Large families says the managing and there used to be com petition among the boys for jobs on a Globe when one boy grew out of the he passed it along to his kid we cant hire boys under i guess now a boy Over 14 can make More Money on some other or else his folks Are giving him a big allowance and he has no reason to want to go to multiply the Globe by and you have a pretty Good sketch of some of the things that Are happening to every daily paper in the Linwood publisher of the is in a position to know that the problems of his Sheet they got in and in 1943 they got per cent less than they got in there was no curtailment of quotas for papers under Cir of which there Are published in towns of under Popula you can get your Hometown paper overseas More easily if its a in the heart of Ohio farming the Archbold Buckeye ships out 275 copies to gis All Over the world every on eighth of the papers total the Buckeye makes a Good example of whats stirring among the because it has knocked off a fistful of National prizes for this and including general in the first Archbold is a deeply religious mennonite Community with a population of when the first paper was founded there in 1886 by he says the mennonites had a moral ban against Reading this stymied Taylor for some but he sex i waited for the next at Taylor still edits the his 71yearold wife is the Star and his two than All the millions of words pounded out daily by High powered correspondents working for syndicates and leased wire heres a letter from iwo Jima which Billy Meacham wrote his wife in and which the Paducah Sun Democrat republished As you we Are on iwo Jima and this is our sixth i Haven had my clothes off nor have i As much As washed my face since things have been plenty but i am Safe and Well and wish i was Back on that even though i did get pretty seasick on the Way Over from in sitting in a foxhole and believe me it feels plenty Good when these mortar shells Start i cant write much in All this con and you probably have read All the news in the Ive prayed More in the six Days Ive been Here than i did in All my life i know you All Are praying constantly for me and that makes a fellow feel mighty even in the once impersonal pages of the big time metropolitan of published in 90 cities of Over Pete zilch picture will turn up when he captures two yank the army weekly 1945 germans or Breaks his leg stumbling Down the and the casualty lists look longer and More ominous in the big Dity very much on the increase just now Are columns giving servicemen and their families in formation about soldiers and sailors civil re veterans organizations and the some of these columns undertake to give individual read ers confidential readers who Only scan headlines and dont bother about the text of stories Are Apt to get the impression that Eisenhower and Montgomery Are smashing Way through the enemy single handed or at Best covered by a Squadron of b17 All from Brooklyn and shouting nuts the people who write the Heads appear to be incurably and civilians who read them must find it hard to understand Why the War did not end in even in the by the the War has banished crime from Page it takes a very Juicy rape or murder to rate a big play in spite of the spectacular climb to popularity of several War Ernie Pyle and Hal the american press at no columnist has been Able to Challenge the position of Walter Winchell As the one with the most widespread Winchell fans still gobble up his Broadway his intimate investigations of the International scene and his word among the political Drew Pearson and Westbrook Pegler Are still holding their own near the top in circulation editors say that the most popular comics of the moment Are Terry and the Dick Tracy and lil but in almost any paper you pick up you can find some of the old favourites such As us Joe bringing up father and Little orphan the old Riddle about whether the Chicken or the egg came first has a parallel in the paper business should newspapers Lead Public opinion or merely try to reflect it As with the Chicke egg there seems to be no one answer that everybody will but the last presidential Campaign made it appear that americans do not pay As much attention to what they read in the papers As editors would like to think they sixty percent of All daily papers in the states and 53 percent of the weeklies came out for Tom Dewey before the publishers say that concern with Freedom of the press is As Strong As Ever in Noyes the Ironwood Globe is satisfied that newspapers Are in exceptionally Good conscientious a crowd As you could expect to numerous mechanical developments that have been in experimental stages for several years May make some changes in newspaper product Tion but your postwar paper probably wont look much different from the one you left least for another decade or by facsimile and television gadgets May be ready either to supplement or supplant the newspaper As we know it Robert Brown of editor the Industry leading Trade believes that newspaper staffs will be both enlarged and improved As a result of lessons Learned during the hundreds of newspapermen from individual papers in cities like Des Moines and Paul Are overseas As War Corre Many of these men Are sent out to give their papers exclusive coverage and according to Elmer office of War inform tuition to bleed off some of their papers excess this Means that Many american new writers who might otherwise never have left this country Are getting a broader viewpoint about the rest of the after the War  bring this viewpoint and their papers May become less provincial and More International Brown foresees greater attention to interpretive which will demand higher qualifications among this in turn should create a better pay scale for newsmen and May put an end to milking newspapers of their Best Talent by weekly Advertis ing Public relations that have been offering More one thing is and the men who make the newspapers know reporters Are going to have to be on their toes and Bat when they sit Down after the War and write about the far Corners of the if they Start shovelling there liable to get be youll have been Page ii