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JANUARY 1957

KLU KLUX KLAN RESURFACES IN QUEENS

Get into a conversation with a long time Queens resident and you're likely to discover a subscriber of the Long Island Star- Journal, a daily paper that informed the community about local and world news until it folded in 1968. A banner across the Star Journal masthead reminded readers that the newspaper's name came from the merger of the Long Island Daily Star (1876) and the North Shore Daily Journal - The Flushing Journal (1841).

Welcome to January 1957!

As schools were integrating and President Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in for his second term, promising to heal a "divided world" threatened by international communism, Queens residents were startled to find an grim specter of past oppression resurfacing in our borough. On January 19, the Star-Journal's late edition reported that "A fiery cross was burned today on the lawn of a quiet 'Negro' [as African-Americans were called then] family's Bayside home after a Ku Klux Klan message, attached to a brick, was thrown through the window at 2:15 am." Ruel Lester and his wife Betty were asleep in the bedroom when the brick came crashing in.

A police spokesman states, "Lester summoned Bayside police who searched the neighborhood for the two men seen driving away from the scene and removed the 5- by-3 foot cross and the message for examination. Written in a scrawl across a plain index card were the words: 'This is no juvenil delinquent. K.K.K.' " Lester, an accountant, said he had been living in the house for five years and never had any trouble with anyone. "I can't understand it," he exclaimed.

The Lesters, who are active in the Community Church of Bayside, live in a section of 'Negro' residences which have been in the community for nearly 50 years. These are surrounded by homes owned by white families. Recently a developer erected an interracial colony of homes near 204th street. Police reported they have not investigated an incident of cross burning in several years. Some 25 years ago the northern branch of the KKK was active, and burned fiery crosses in front of many homes.

Another item on the police blotter: the headline for January 22nd reads "Mad Bomber Tells All." If you thought it took a long time to catch the Unabomber, check out this story! In Waterbury, Connecticut, "a mild-mannered 53-year-old toolmaker today confessed that he is the "Mad Bomber" who has planted 31 homemade pipe bombs in New York City in the past 16 years." George Metesky told police his motive was revenge against the Consolidated Edison Company for 25 years of semi-invalidism stemming from a 1931 plant accident.

After police discovered (in the home he shared with two elderly sisters) the lathe on which he prepared the bombs he confessed "calmly and readily" the police report. Law enforcement worked quietly for 16 years building a description of the bomber whose explosive pipes, usually encased in a red sock, injured 15 persons in New York City. They took a calculated risk during the previous month and asked media cooperation by throwing the light of publicity on the bomber's activities. The bomber stupidly paid off the gamble by writing to the newspapers.

The Star-Journal reports that an alert Queens detective, Bert Scott of Forest Hills, discovers a key clue. Scott discovers documents on George Metesky among the voluminous records of Consolidated Edison employees. "He found the right file at 10 AM yesterday," according to Deputy Commissioner Walter Arm. "It contained 10 letters from an injured workman in which familiar letters and phrases pointed to the writer as the Bomber. The letters were from Metesky."

However, on January 24, Star-Journal is told, "Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy of Bayside concedes that an employee of the Consolidated Edison Company turned up the documents leading to the arrest of George Metesky." The clerk, sharp-eyed Alice Kelly, is eligible for the $25,000 reward offered for the capture of the 'Mad Bomber.' Commissioner Kennedy accused Con Ed of delaying the arrest for two years by claiming that old employee records were not on file.

As he was being transported from Manhattan Criminal Court to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric examination, the crowd asks Metesky if he was sorry. Metesky's blue eyes twinkled. "Yes," he laughed, adding, 'I'm sorry I injured people, but I'm glad I did it."

As the New Year began, the editors in lamenting the passing of the last trolley line in the New York City, writes "the rumbling, clanking cars that crawl over the Queensboro Bridge, giving access to the Welfare Island elevators, will soon give way to buses." When the bridge was opened in 1909, so little traffic was expected that the trolley lines were laid down the middle of the roadway. They continue, "There was nothing to indicate then that Queens, with a population a shade over 200,000, would, within a generation, multiply that by nine. Nor was anyone overly sold on the idea that gasoline-powered vehicles would soon replace Old Dobbin."

The trolley tracks stayed in the middle of the bridge quite some time before they were relegated to 'shelves' at the outer of the span. Their lament for the trolleys concludes, "Any day now the old cars will vanish into limbo and along with them will go the last opportunity anywhere in the city to ride out of the hurried present and recapture for a few moments the serenity of a slower-moving past."

If only the editors had waited a few decades! Today's A.M. rush-hour traffic on the Queensboro Bridge is plenty slow moving -- and not particularly serene!

But the commuters' complaints in 1957 sound very familiar to today's ears: public transit was no bed of roses. On the front page of January 2, the Star-Journal's headline read: "Bus Cut Schedules Posted -- TA Says: The Public Be D----d." They paper continues, "the Transit Authority today thumbed its nose at the Board of Estimate and the riding public as it posted new driver schedules which will chop almost 1,000 bus trips from Queens lines daily, ignoring a unanimous Board vote against the cuts." The TA claims that empty seats, not cutting costs, are the reason behind the proposed bus slash.

During that evening's rush hour, members of Mike Quill's Transit Workers Union protesting the Transit Authority's plans to cut the number of change booths in the New York subway by half, picket the Roosevelt Avenue IND station in Jackson Heights. Outraged union workers claim that reducing the number of booths would mean longer lines and more subway crime. Despite the cold, more than 5,000 long-suffering Queens straphangers stand in lines five and six deep to sign the petitions demanding to save the change booths.

A disbelieving Star-Journal sent its team of reporters to interview shivering riders on "ever-growing conga lines" along some of the routes in Flushing and Jamaica where the cuts would bite most deeply. The chilled reporters, in the middle of the season's worst cold spell, gauge the riders' reactions.

"The service is lousy as it is," said Julian Leader of Kew Gardens Hills. Stamping his feet to keep warm as he waited on the Q-44 line. He continues, "we sometimes have to wait half an hour or more for a bus."

The line will lose 35 runs daily.

As the mercury dropped even further during the month of January and milk froze in its bottles on Queens doorsteps, chilled riders in Malba and Whitestone offer to build their own bus shelters. "We're willing to pay for the labor and material ourselves," the president of the local civic association declares.

But if winter comes, can spring be far behind? Star-Journal readers who brighten the dark days of January by dreaming of the baseball season to come are relieved. "A lot of idle talk," a Yankees spokesman tabbed recent statements by Mickey Mantle and Don Larsen that they'd quit baseball for golf and tending bar if their salary demands were not met.

Mickey has indicated he's asking about twice what he was paid last season, believed to have been around $35,000. Larsen, who pitched the only perfect World Series game in history last October, yesterday backed away from the role of bartender, even as a gag, refusing to pose for photographers in a bartender's apron at San Diego, California. "I don't ever intend to tend bar, for fun or for real," the playboy pitcher exclaimed.

He continued, "I didn't have any idea that wisecrack would be published and I'm pretty mad about it." 'Big Don' said he expects to reach agreement on a contract "shortly." Friends said he wants $27,500, reportedly about twice what he got in 1956.

Five years later Queens will have its own baseball team. But that's another story for another time!

That's the way it was in January 1957!