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Mayor Kelly had to do some quick explaining. Without losing his air of good-natured calm, he informed Chicago: "For several recent years I was fortunate in my business dealings. I had large legitimate transactions. A large number of those ventures were highly profitable and my income tax was in the higher brackets.* In 1926 I was manager of the campaign of George E. Brennan for Senator. At times it became necessary for me to make advances for expenses for which I was subsequently reimbursed. I did not consider when I filed my tax returns that the repayment of those advances could be considered as income. Accordingly I did not include them in my returns. . . . "Subsequently the income tax division checked over my returns and claimed such sums should be treated as income. . . . The government's decision made the added tax some $60,000. With the added penalties and interest the amount of my settlement was approximately $100,000. ... I considered it a simple business transaction, honestly handled and now a closed book." Mayor Kelly's explanation failed to convince many Chicagoans because : 1) money lent and repaid is capital, not income, and therefore the Treasury could not have taxed it; 2) the total official cost of the Brennan campaign in 1926 was $73,584,23 and not $450,000, the amount the Mayor implied he advanced; 3) Ed Kelly was for nearly 40 years a salaried employe of the Chicago Sanitary District-}-and was not known to have had outside "business dealings" which could roll up $450,000 in three years; 4) during this three-year period the Sanitary District passed through a scandalous epoch which resulted in the alleged graft of $5,000,000. When he took office at City Hall, Mayor Kelly broadcast thus: "All I have—what little I have—I got from the good people of Chicago." Fully aware that politicians are not in the game for their health, the "good people of Chicago" last week wondered about their own generosity. Publisher Hearst's deepest motive in trying to tag Mayor Kelly as a tax-dodger was perfectly apparent. When Mayor Anton Joseph Cermak died from an assassin's bullet in Miami last spring, Mr. Hearst sat down at his San Simeon estate in California and dispatched a lordly front-page editorial to the Herex to the effect that Chicago citizens should elect their own successor. The political bosses roundly snubbed Hearst by having the City Council, under special authorization of the Legislature, select Ed Kelly as World's Fair Mayor. That was Item No. 1 in the Hearst grudge fight. Item No. 2 was the fact that Mayor Kelly had long been a protege of Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick and his Chicago Tribune. As president of the Sanitary District in its early days and its good friend ever since, Colonel McCormick gave Engineer Kelly his first big boost up to political importance. But the real casus belli was the Chicago School Board's determined campaign to defrill the Chicago school system, eliminate junior high schools and special departments, thereby save some $4,000,000 per year (TIME, July 24; July 31). The Herex inaugurated a "Save Our Schools" drive, pounded the issue day after day on its front page and at mass meetings, ran its circulation up some 25,000, but failed completely to swing Mayor Kelly against the Board. Thereupon the Herex switched its attack, went after the Mayor