No Duck and Cover: 30-Day Sentence for Civil Disobedience

July 17, 1957, Vol. II, No. 38

Ten Sit Out Alert, Jailed for 30 Days

Ten people who because of religious or moral beliefs refused to take cover during last Friday's civil-defense drill were sentenced that afternoon to 30 days in the workhouse. Last year several of the same group assembled in Washington Square; this year it was Sara Roosevelt Park on the East Side. The women were sent to the House of Detention on 10th Street and Sixth Avenue, and the men to Hart's Island.

Magistrate Walter J. Bayer called them a "heartless bunch of individuals who breathe contempt" for the law, and meted out a penalty much stiffer than the 5-day sentences a number of them had received the previous year...

Art Ford to do a Weekly TV Program on the Village

A weekly television show based in the mind of its producer on the real Greenwich Village is to be unveiled over WABD-Dumont, Channel 5, around September 1. The producer is radio's Art Ford, 34-year-old m.c. of the "Make-Believe Ballroom" and "Milkman's Matinee." His new project is to be entitled "Art Ford's Greenwich Village Party."

The program will focus on Village music -- folk, jazz, bongo, and classical -- on Village art and artists, and on then off-Broadway theatre and night-club entertainment. "It will not try to encompass the whole Village," Ford last week told the Voice, "but what it does encompass will be as accurate and real as we can make it, not a stereotyped caricature of Greenwich Village."

His plan is to open each week in a simulated Village studio-apartment where a party will be in progress attended by real Villagers -- entertainers and just plain people -- invited for the occasion. Spontaneity will be sought for by not informing the guests when "live" cameras are putting them on the air.

[Each weekday morning, we post an excerpt from another issue of the Voice, going in order from our oldest archives. Visit our Clip Job archive page to see excerpts back to 1956.]