And of course, I got deeper and deeper into the direction which I was travelling, humor. And it became a hilarious paper; people would scream at it. That's when the Church; I guess they didn't like the idea of the headlines, they thought it should be the old Quaker line such as the old Boston Post, or something. Uncle Ned, or whatever it was. So they put the crush on me, I lost a lot of sales, through South Boston, especially in the Catholic area, in fact they invaded the South End area.

I probably lost 10,000 sales, but it didn't put me out of business. I was doing about 60,000 at the time. It dropped to about 50,000. I had about 200 stores in South Boton and they started putting the papers under the counter. Especially stores on the block of a church.

The Catholic League of Decency, established in Chicago at the time, they put the paper on the list. They were self-appointed censors, you know, they told people what they could read and what they couldn't read. Although there was nothing in the paper that could be called obscene, none of the four letter words that's permissible today ever appeared in the paper. They just didn't like it, that's all. It's just one of those things. You just can't figure them out, that's all. There was nothing I could do about it.

I married in '43, in '42 I got married, somewheres around there. It didn't last very long, it lasted three or four years, and that went out the window. Then I went along as a happy bachelor for quite some time until another woman talked me into marrying her.

While I was in here running the newspaper, these groups of people that I know who are interested in horse racing and wire service, which was legal at the time, they come in and wanted too hire space in here, and we made arrangements, they pay me so much. Then of course the whole thing cracked down on me; investigating committee started, investigation of the wire service, and Kefauver.

Continental went broke. You see, a lot of the bankers in Chicago were behind Continental, a lot of the racketmen were behind Continental, they were afraid of being exposed, cause they were really cheating on the take of money out there, they were taking in millions a year, millions and millions, and weren't declaring all the money, and rather than face prison they blew up the whole thing, and set fire to the thing, and a couple of people were murdered, and there was quite a hullaballoo about the whole thing, out in Chicago. Well, that finished up Continental. Then United Press stepped in. When UP stepped in they took over everything, as they anticipated doing, they took over the whole thing. UP became strong, in fact UP became one of the biggest in the whole country. Then they absorbed, gobbled International, became UPI, and then they controlled the whole thing. I went down to get a UP wire service later on, but they wouldn't sell it to me.

They gave it to the Record American instead, cause the Record American didn't use Continental; they had Associated at the time. And the Record American did exactly what I was going to do with it, and that's how they're making money on UP. They're a pretty smart bunch of boys down there, I don't know where they are now, I remember talking to them down there. Anyway, I went along after that, I didn't care whether I got it or not. The paper was the thing I lived for, the thing I wanted.

I was covering the entire city of Boston, I was shipping out to Lowell, I was shipping to Fall River, New Bedford, we covered Providence, I had a distributor down in Providence, and I had one in Brockton, I had one in Holbrook, Randolph, all of Quincy, Lynn, Revere, I had all around, within a radius of 25, 30 miles of Boston, we covered, each driver covered a different area. I covered quite a bit. But the outside sales were not to be compared to the sales in the city. I had about 30,000 in Boston. All over the city. In any store in the city. Scollay Square was a good area, the West End was a big area. The New York St. was a good area. Dorchester, Roxbury was very good, also the Back Bay, Jamaica Bay, the North End, all the streets down in the North End, I practically had every store in the city selling papers. There were about 1400.

Anyway, so I went along, then the Urban Renewal thing came in. I realized then that it would hurt everybody in the city, the way they were taking the city apart, and I question the legality of taking these properties by eminent domain and giving them to somebody else. Which is absolutely illegal, it's still in my opinion illegal, and it was declared so by Judge Dimmond of the Supreme Court in Alaska. And that was the first time it was taken to a Supreme Court. He said this Urban Renewal, this group, just a freewheeling group and not a part of the state or territory of Alaska, they're not responsible to the people in any respect, they certainly can't take the property from one person and give it to another to develop.

They usually kept it from going to the United States Supreme Court by paying off these people and paying the price that they asked. It's caused a lot of destruction here in Boston. It's driven 250,000 people out of the city; it put like 25,000 small businessmen out of business, and the cost to the people of Boston, as I predicted, would be about two billion dollars, and the amount of money they got from the government 200 and some odd million dollars. And if they weren't getting today about 80 some odd million a year from the sales tax coming into Boston, your tax rate today would be about 150 to 160 dollars, which I predicted six years ago, that that's what it would be.

The stores that I had were all torn down, I lost 850-900 stores, out of 1400. And then of course the people moved away also. Where they went, I don't know, I couldn't find any of them. They just vanished.... They started moving out in 1961, 1962. In 1963 I began to feel the slump. Every week a store closed, five stores, eight stores, 20 stores. One fellow came back after delivering his route, came back in about an hour. I said, how many stores you have left? He said about 20. He had had 125. Another fellow, the same thing. All of them the same way. Eventually it wound up, I said the hell with this, I'm losing too much on this thing.

I tried to move out of town with it, but the cost of distribution out of town is prohibitive. You take it out to Framingham, or go up to Winchester, and put out 100 papers, the trip to there isn't worth it. And if you get a distributor up there, they want too much. There wasn't any concentrated group; it wasn't the South End; the South End had about 80,000 people, which was the ideal place where you circulate at a minimum cost. I had a store on every corner see. And it made it fine. But once that was spread out there was no way to recapture it, there was nothing I could do with it.

So I just had to close up.

I closed up in 1966.

Up 'til then I worked every week, never missed an issue. Even when I was sick, and had to lie in bed on my stomach, and run my typewriter beside my bed, after having had an operation, and all these things, I continued publishing, never missed an issue. A little bit late a couple of times, but never actually missed an issue, in the entire 29 years.