The Press: Renewed Crusade

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The roomful of reporters and photographers burst into applause at a Manhattan hospital last week as syndicated Labor Columnist Victor Riesel entered. It was 41-year-old Riesel's first press conference since he was blinded six weeks earlier by an unknown acid thrower (TIME, April 16 et seq.). The little (5 ft. 4 in.) New York Daily Mirror columnist had lost 30 Ibs. Two neat white surgical pads shielded his eyes. But Riesel was cheerfully game and bristling with determination to renew his long fight against labor racketeers, whom he charges with the acid attack.

He thanked his doctors for repairing his facial burns. "Take a look at my face," he said. "Nearly perfect, isn't it?" Except for the eye pads, a reddish patch on his right cheek was the only apparent trace of the attack. "And to think that acid bleached the sidewalk," he said. The familiar Riesel mustache was missing, he explained, only for surgical convenience. Actually, he added, "acid makes the hair grow. I think I'll patent it as a hair restorer and sell it to bald newspapermen."

Riesel's banter gave way to a fist-clenched plea for a congressional investigation of mobsters in organized labor, and he repledged himself to the crusade. "I have no sensitivity about being blind," he said. "They haven't scared me. I can't see, but that doesn't mean I can't write the same kind of copy." In writing it, he can already touch-type and, for note-taking, will learn Braille "or anything else that will help me." Riesel said that he would leave the hospital this week—still with a police bodyguard—and go back to "the typewriter and bang away. They knocked me out for six weeks—but that's all."