Precise, pleasant Miss Mary Cheever was a person of consequence in Gary, Ind. She had taught French and Spanish for 24 years, mostly at Lew Wallace High School, had once been president of the Gary branch of the American Association of University Women, and had seen Paris and South America. At 45, Miss Cheever surveyed her world sensibly through rimless eyeglasses and lived a rich, full, civic life.
One lowering night two weeks ago, Mary Cheever put her car in the garage after a P.T.A. meeting. At the mouth of the dingy alley next to her apartment house, a man in a long-visored cap sprang at her. He clawed for her shoulder bag, clubbed her on the head with a pistol, shot her in the back. She screamed three times and died in an ambulance ten minutes later.
The Bitter Assessment. This was too much, at last, even for steel-tough Gary (pop. 135,000), which had only murmured over seven other murders since Jan. 1 (all the killers were caught). Gary had long been used to crime. Six years ago some minor hoodlums of the Capone syndicate took over the town, infested it with prostitutes and panders, bookmaking joints and blind pigs.
Last week the bloodguilt fell upon all Gary, although where to lay the bitter assessment was disputed. Fifteen hundred aroused women banded together at seedy Seaman hall one night. They barred their menfolk from the building, resolved to march on City Hall four blocks away where the council was in session. On the way over, clots of men humbly joined them.
In the chamber, small, smart Mayor Eugene Swartz and his suave police chief, Millard Matovina, braced themselves against a fluted column for the onslaught. Only 30 or so in the crowd managed to get into the room, but they could hear the ominous rumble of the rest outside.
Trim Mrs. Ida Saks said that the state police must be called in to probe the "foul situation." If the "city government does not clean up ... the women can and will, with God's help." A righteous cheer rose.
The Blame Divided. For four hours—until after midnight—men & women, black & white, asked for more police, better street lighting, more housing. They shrieked derisively at bumbling council attempts to shift responsibility. But not all were ready to saddle the politicians with all the blame. Said the Rev. L. K. Jackson, Negro pastor of St. Paul's Baptist Church: "Even in my own church I was told that you can't fight gambling and prostitution. When I chose to fight the rackets, I was rapped by one of our Negro papers as a 'rabble-rouser.' The cure has got to come from within."
The mayor came back with the familiar questions & answers of the cornered politician. Where, he wanted to know, had all these good people been when he tried to talk up legislation for slum clearance? If they were looking for slot machines, he could fetch them out of practically every self-respecting lodge hall in town as well as in the joints. Cried Mayor Swartz: "Sometimes the truth hurts."