'35 or '36 it was, show business had just about fallen apart. I was opening a dancing school, in fact I took over a dancing school for, what's his name, I can't think of his name off hand, but he had a school up there on Massachusetts Avenue, a little short fellow, I took over his school for a while. I didn't like that; he was just paying me on a commission basis and he was getting all the money, teaching tap up there and teaching acrobatics. Then I went to work for the Starahide company, selling building maintenance, sandblasting building, cleaning building, and things like that.

I got quite a few jobs, in fact I got the Trinity Church over in the Back Bay here, we did the whole face of that church, water-proofed it, $3000 job, took about two weeks to get it, and 20 per cent commission, which wasn't too bad.

You know all those figures on the front. They're all made of sandstone, you know. They all have these figures depicting the various chronological eras in the Bible as it goes through. We sandblasted those, steamcleaned them rather, because you couldn't sandblast them, you'd ruin the sandstone. You'd steamclean them with acid. Then we waterproofed them, we blew wax into them. That's so as to preserve it. I got quite a few jobs. But eventually the fellow I was working for went out of business, Starahide his name was, and I looked for something else.

About '37, or '38, they had a WPA project at the time with vaudevillians. That was quite a thing, boy, that was really a hang-up. They would take professional people and put you in a storehouse over in South Boston someplace, you sit around all day and go home at night. We were supposed to be rehearsing and putting on shows.

About this time I came near marrying a girl, but she said no and she was very smart because she was quite a bit older than myself, some fifteen years older than myself, so I'm glad she said no. She explained it, she said I'll be an old lady and you'll be young, it won't work out, it just won't work out Mike. I didn't care about that, but she said no, so that was it.

Then I decided to start a paper, in March of '38. I had been in court, I had listened to several cases, I thought some of the stuff was very humorous. When you read it in the daily papers they seemed to take the whole thing serious. It didn't appear very serious to me, if a man was chasing a prostitute through an alley, a policeman chasing a prostitute through an alley, or two or three of them, jumping over barrels and she climbing over fences, trying to capture a girl for soliciting or something like that, I thought it was very funny. I thought you could get a lot of humor out of it.

I just wanted to cover the police courts, and the blotters, things like that. I had a typewriter, that's all. I had a little space in the house, on Newman Park, I lived with my mother there at the time. Putting out 10,000 papers in those days, an eight-page tabloid, the cost is only 75 to 80 dollars a week.

I started out as the Midtown Journal. I put out the first issue; prior to that I had gone around solicited some advertising. In those days papers were selling for three cents a copy. I got a few ads, I got $30 to $40 worth of advertising, but I was always short of enough money to pay the printers. I was out at work nights, dancing in these barrooms. You could pick up $80 to $90 a week there, so I was putting my money into the paper to get the paper rolling. It got rolling along in about '42 or '43.

The first issue I put out I gave away. I put out 10,000 copies and had boys put them in all the doorways. The people were a little bit amazed, I guess, to see a different kind of a newspaper. I went along for a few months, for four or five months, depending on the advertising, but the advertisers in the area weren't too responsive. Eventually I moved deeper and deeper into the phase that I wanted to go, that is towards more humor, then every story became a humorous story, everything had a humorous angle to it, regardless of what the story might be.

Finally a tremendous buildup started in the paper, it really started to build up awfully fast about '46, '47. It was during the war, I sent out a lot of papers to the various camps; and these boys--I got a lot of letters from them, and subscriptions.

Then I decided to sell the paper. It was kind of discouraging at first, and I put them off to sale at three cents a copy. I think the first week I sold 25 papers. I cut the printing down to a thousand papers, and even then got most of them back. But the following week I sold fifty, and that was a hundred per cent increase. So I kept going by percentages, and before I knew it I was doing five thousand a week. That was in the early forties, '42. Then we were up to 8000, then 10,000, and 20,000, and 30,000.

Then I went to a nickel on it. I was the first one of the daily papers, in Boston, or any of the papers in the city, to go to five cents. Then there was a tremendous surge in the paper, went to 40,000, 50,000, hit 60,000 a week, paid circulation.

But of course at that time I was handling distribution myself. Friday I'd take a fellow with me, load the big Buick up that I had, we'd go out, he'd jump into the front of stores with them. I delivered until I got up to 36,000. Then I just couldn't do it all; it was too much: writing the paper, covering the courts, delivering the paper, so I finally hired a few fellows to take care of the distribution for me. Finally, eventually I wound up with eight or ten men just handling distribution. I did the rest of the work. But even at that, the rest of the work, writing the paper, covering the courts, was an 80-hour week. And then I went to a dime eventually.

The paper of course encountered a lot of difficulty, such as the Catholic Church. They thought it was a pretty horrible newspaper. They sent their agents around to tell the people in the various stores in the neighborhoods where they lived that they wouldn't trade there unless they took the papers out. I lost a lot of sales that way.

I had headlines that they claimed were double entendres. I remember one particular headline "Two in Bed, Tangle Lasses." If you read it fast it sounded peculiar. Another one was "Big Balls Win Gal Prize." Of course, it was nothing more than a girl attending a drinking party, and wound up in court, she won the prize for large highballs, though she never collected it. You couldn't put down large highballs, you didn't have room enough, you only had a certain amount of type, you only had 21 units that you could use, and you had to write the whole headline, so you got some weird results as a result of being confined to so many units. You kept switching words around until you found what you wanted.