The Press: Taxi!

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Last month Editor Hugh Alwyn Inness Brown of Taxi Weekly, Manhattan, returned from a business trip, was greeted by a process server, shown a copy of the paper published in his absence. Pop-eyed with amazement Editor Brown flipped pages to "The Coffee Pot," a colyum conducted by Hackman Otto Lewis. This is what he read: "The MEANEST RIDER! He rides from Jackson Heights to 52d street & 6th Ave. Just an old grouch as mean as he looks and he looks terrible. Grumbles from the minute he enters your cab until he pays you the exact fare. . . ." And so on for six lacerating paragraphs to the conclusion: "The name of the man who has the somewhat dubious reputation of being . . . the world's worst rider, is Darling!"

Editor Brown pocketed the summons, to answer one Herbert T. Darling's $50,000 libel suit, no less distressed by his paper's breach of etiquet than by the fact that the "meanest" rider was not Mr. Darling but a man employed at the same address. Last week Taxi Weekly printed a lengthy retraction and apology, but despite the good-natured advice of the court, Mr. Darling continued his suit, which pends.

Mortified though he might be, Editor Brown of Taxi Weekly had many a more pressing matter to demand his time and energy. As champion of Manhattan's taxi industry he had to keep vigorously alive Taxi Weekly's battle for limitation of cab licenses, for higher rates.* He had to keep a critical eye upon efforts of various agencies to "organize" the city's taximen. He had to maintain his perpetual guard against unfair treatment of drivers by police. Most difficult and important of all, he had to continue striving to hold the confidence of four conflicting elements in the city's cab business: the driver, the owner-driver, the fleet owner, the company operator.

Taxi Weekly discreetly avoids stirring any controversy within the ranks, but is quick to pounce upon threats from without, great or small. In 1927 it campaigned successfully against proposed legislation to raise insurance rates on cabs. And with scarcely less vigor it commanded the attention of Mayor James John Walker to the case of a Jewish driver who had been deprived of his license for refusing to pick up a passenger on Yom Kippur Eve. A two-year battle with the police department forced the opening of "star chamber" hearings of drivers, stamped out police practices by which cabmen had paid $1,000,000 a year petty graft. The paper has provided free counsel for cabmen, maintains gratis a "bureau of fair play" to collect fares for trusting drivers who fall victim to ruses. It is a sworn enemy of all "rackets." It also aspires to be a "friendly, happy" paper, and for a time gave cabmen the syndicated gladness of the late Dr. Frank Crane.