﻿Red Conspiracy Against Senator Sorghum Exposed by Reporter of Evening “Blast”
A Model of “Good Reporting” by T-BONE SLIM

The crew of the Universal Textile Corporation were out in force playing baseball during noon hour— (all three of ‘em). A delivery truck came raring round the corner, driven by Senator Sorghum’s nine-year-old son, and struck one of the crew while he was trying to make a shoe string catch. Doctors pronounced one third of the crew dead and shortly thereafter eighteen directors were trying to pull a man from the relief line. from the relief line. The evening Blast came out with a terrible tirade against “the bums” that would stay on relief, 47,000 of them—when the country is so sorely in need of help and eighteen directors are crying their eyes out. Owing to his terrible calanuatiy the U.T.E. had to shut down for the day. Considerable excitement was occasioned by a fist fight between the morticians over the corpse—eight of the morticians were taken to the hospital and one to the morgue. All others had minor bruises and will recover. Each and all of the 117 doctors that made a rush for the dead man’s pulse (happening to be in the neighborhood) swore up and down, lengthwise and crosswise, the man’s ticker had stopped three and a third seconds before the light delivery truck flattened him. “A clear case of heart failure,” the doctors argue, and point out the man’s Ingersol was still running. — Coroner Wishy Washy deemed it unnecessary to hold an inquest and remarked as he took down his fishingrod: “When I return from Lake Whoopitalong I shall interview the relatives, and let them, choose suicide or heart failure. Personally I think it is a red conspiracy to wreck and injure the Senator’s son. The reds down in public square, are purple in the face denouncing it a parasite’s frame-up, a deeply laid plot to discredit Karl Marx, Norman Thomas, and Earl Browder—”a woman in gray was seen to hand the Senator a bill just before the accident,” they claim.
It was here that Mr. T-Bone Slim who rose from virtual obscurity to obesity and to head of the Nephews of the American Revolution was run out of town by the Citizens’ Committee. Four of the committee, that escorted him to the city limits staggered back into town at high-noon, after regaining consciousness—carrying the other three. When interviewed by the Blast reporter the committee announced: Mr. T-Bone acted the perfect gentleman and grabbed a Reading Road freight train. All towns have been warned and cyclone signals are up as far as Annville. Daphne County refused to honor the requisitions of the 117 doctors, (for feeling the dead man’s pulse) on the grounds that the dead man escaped from the morgue late last night or early this morning. There’s liable to be hell popping because many of the doctors had made arrangements to throw a party on the strength of the dead man’s pulse.
Federal Gumshoes sent dozens of their slickest sleuts. (Blast’s copyrighted spelling for sleuths). Senator Sorghum rose in his wrath in tears and on top his desk demanded brokenly that the Senate investigate the foul, dastardly attempt against his son’s life. “It’s getting so,” he said, “a senator’s family is safer in a powder magazine.”
U.T.C. held a private investigation on the twelvth floor of their main office—that’s where the carpet is. They called up all their foremen, front men and thirty inspectors and questioned them as to who gave the boys permission to play ball in front of the company’s windows. The super and general manager made a rush to the window to get a mouthful of fresh air and somehow tripped (not being used to a rug) and catapulted head first out of the window.
The company’s statement is (hinting at financial worries) “we have warned our men not to gamble in stock or play the races.”
The window of the super, when interviewed by the Blast sports editor, says succinely as she cracked two boards in the dining room table: “It’s a gooddam lie, my husband was pushed out of the window, he was almost due for an old age pension.” The widow of the general manager fainted and hasn’t come to as we go to press: The society editor found the corpse, a young man hardly more than a boy, alive and well at the parent’s residence. “He stoutly denied he had been hit by a truck, denied he had been playing ball that day and denied he had been working that day” and after the society editor drank her third glass of hard cider, the young man specifically denied he had ever seen the inside of a morgue.
Just as we go to press word conies that the super and general manager found alive and well in the lower floor awning. Somebody’s been doing some tall lying around here and it now begins to look as if the only one that got killed and stayed killed was the mortician. We are sending our famed Walter Windshield to determine whether or not that mortician pulled a fast one and is at this very moment buttonholing the sorrowing relatives at the morgue. More tomorrow. It all comes out in the Blast.

What does it amount to?
Universal textile corporation’s crew consists of three kids in knee britches; seventeen bosses and thirty-six directors. The rest is all hooey and ballyhooey.—T.B.S.