Parade

One chill morning last week the ranking Democrats of Pennsylvania halted election celebrations to journey to a slag-piled hill near the town of McAdoo. There Governor-elect George H. Earle stood beside a freshly-turned grave. There, too, stood Senator-elect Joseph F. Guffey, Democratic State Chairman David Lawrence, onetime Commonwealth Secretary Richard J. Beamish. Presently 10,000 mourners gathered from nearby towns, began to chant the Requiem responses in a half-dozen tongues as three obscure men were laid to rest. The dead buried, a handful of women surged around Governor-elect Earle to scream in Italian: "If you don't send those murderers to the electric chair we'll kill them ourselves." He did not understand, but later he passed the hat among his friends for the families of the newly dead.

What had drawn the Democratic high command of Pennsylvania to such a bleak spot was a political massacre. On Election Eve in the tiny mining town of Kelayres, 600 Democrats hopeful of ending a 20-year Republican rule in their township decided to parade. A truckload of children and a man carrying a U. S. flag led a torchlight procession four blocks up the main street to the intersection where Republican Boss Joseph Bruno and his relatives have houses on three corners. On the fourth corner stands the Church of the Immaculate Conception.

As the children's truck passed Boss Bruno's house two shots pinged over the crowd. Then machine-gun bullets volleyed from three sides of Bruno's Corner into the jampacked ranks of the marchers. In a minute it was over. By the ruddy light of torches a priest was giving final absolution, his voice rising and falling through the shrieks of women and children. It began to rain.

Five marchers were killed, 13 wounded. Next day Kelayres polled 24 Republican, 662 Democratic votes. Services for three of the dead were held in the bullet-scarred Church of the Immaculate Conception (see cut) at the same corner where they were killed. Twenty miles away Boss Bruno & relatives were in jail, charged with murder.

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