Thank you.
Founded in i38o, the Evening News, which was establishment and
Republican, had been run by the Butler family, which also owned a
local television station and a fortune in American Airlines stock. In recent
decades, the proprietor had been Kate Robinson Butler, a grande
dame who traveled with her poodle in a Rolls-Royce. Butler had built a
lavish printing plant, rimmed with distinctly nonnative tropical plants,
and had gone to similar expense to avoid trouble with unions.* Employees
who hac once tied the papers by hand had continued at their
posts after the work was automated. As papers came off the runway, the
workers would pass their hands over the conveyors, as if offering a sacrament.
They were known as "blessers."6 But the family's stewardship
had ended with Butler's death, in 1974. Now the paper was up for sale
by her estate.
Sounds like classic mismanagement to me, less of a union problem.
