MICHIGAN: Something in the Air

In Grieffs Restaurant on the main drag a mouselike little man turned his palms upward, pointed to the blisters and said: “That’s what I get for having to bury my garbage in the backyard.” A well-dressed young office worker tried to rub the dirt from her nylons with a paper napkin and snapped: “I wish they’d clean the streets.”

Outside, the main streets and back alleys of Pontiac, Mich. (pop. 65,000) were piled with litter. In the back alleys was a three weeks’ accumulation of garbage, in which rats and flies were multiplying. But that was only part of the city’s mess. Motorists parked free because the 800 nickle-an-hour parking meters had not been wound. Some of Pontiac’s recent dead still lay in mortuaries, because the two municipal cemeteries had no gravediggers.

These plagues had smitten Pontiac because 500 municipal workers had struck to win a 15¢ increase for workers paid by the hour, $20 a month for those on salary. The C.I.O.’s State, County and Municipal Workers were willing now to take 10¢ an hour, but the City Commission insisted that it had no money to pay any increases whatever, and would not go into the red to pay them.

Private Fight. Behind the strike was a labor politicians’ feud. Pontiac’s Mayor Arthur J. Law is a onetime president of the U.A.W.’s Fisher Body Local 596 and a member of the U.A.W.’s Reuther wing. In the last city election he beat one Sidney Christmas, pint-sized vice-president of the Pontiac Union Council and an extreme left-winger. Egged on by Christmas, all 16 unions in the council threatened last week to call a sympathy strike Oct. 2 if the city workers’ demands are not met.

That would paralyze Pontiac. since 75% of its wage earners are C.I.O. members. If the City Commission should surrender in the meantime, the Christmas faction would have a victory over Reutherite Law. In either case the people of Pontiac, holding their noses, were caught in the middle.

The ill wind, laden with the stench of garbage, brought good only to golfers, who played free on the municipal course because there was no oneto collect greens fees.