The Tax Man Comes for Mickey Cohen; Covering the Mets

Sept. 25, 1969: A typical screamer headline we put on the late final edition, which was for street sales. The front page of the home delivery edition didn't look like this. The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence says: "We daily permit our children during their formative years to enter a world of police interrogations, of gangsters beating enemies, of spies performing fatal brain surgery and of routine demonstrations of all kinds of killing and maiming." Jack Smith writes a nondupe on tax investigators ... and how they caught Mickey Cohen.

Al Capp had a long run with "Li'l Abner," but at the end of his career, he became extremely conservative, alienating many of his longtime readers. Above, Students Wildly Indignant About Nearly Everything -- or SWINE. "A Night at the Opera" with an appearance by Groucho Marx. I wonder if the academy recorded this series. Readers protest Al Capp's portrayal of People's Park in Berkeley ... and an editorial on UCLA's attempt to fire Angela Davis.

The Times sent New York correspondent John J. Goldman to discover the New York Mets, once baseball's joke but now the champions of the National League East. Sending a correspondent to do a sports story can be as tricky as asking a sportswriter to cover the United Nations. "The hunger for victory in the nation's largest city perhaps was matched only by that of the old Romans who watched gladiators in the Colosseum," Goldman wrote. "Everyone expected the Chicago Cubs to  be lions. But in the end, they were pussycats, finishing second." Romans? What league did they play in? I preferred the view of Manhattan advertising executive and Mets fans Roger Yager, who told Goldman: "We had to get something to replace the Dodgers." --Keith Thursby

Comments

[Chris Morales]

I remember those screamer headlines as a kid. I suppose they served to substitute for the departed newsboys who would yell headlines to passersby. No, our home delivered paper didn't look like that at all.