The Press: Houses for Sale

Even more than most of the U.S. press, Philadelphia’s twice-weekly Tribune found front-page copy in the ordeal of William Edward Myers Jr., 34, a refrigerator-equipment tester, after he moved his wife and three children into a three-bedroom house in Levittown, Pa. The Myerses are Negroes, the first to move into Levittown* and the Tribune, a Negro paper only 21 miles away, gave all-out coverage to the tense week in which state troopers finally discouraged the jeering, stone-throwing mob that kept badgering the Myers home.

Last week, with the crisis clearly ended, the Tribune still found space on Page One for three stories about the Myerses but even those yielded the lead position to an unusual real-estate story suggested by Publisher E. Washington Rhodes, 61, onetime Pennsylvania legislator, state parole board member, and the first Negro to serve as an assistant U.S. Attorney in the area. In two full columns, jumping to a column inside, the paper listed the addresses, prices and brief descriptions of 187 Levittown houses being offered for sale by the Veterans Administration, which has foreclosed on defaulted mortgages. Reported the Tribune succinctly: “The Veterans Administration wants its money, and they don’t care who buys the houses.”

* In Levittown, L.I., half a dozen Negro families have taken houses without any comparable ruckus.