Five months after the trial I went to the judge's office in person and managed to get a few minutes with him. I showed him various evidence including a letter from a former Solicitor General of the PO saying that it was unheard of to prosecute on the first (and in this case the only) offense. I explained to him what a TV was, why the magazine was being published and the good it had done. All of these things I could do myself in his chambers but it had not been possible to do them in open court. The result was my contention that the post office had in effect framed me with the letter, knowing that I'd have to plead guilty, and hoping that they could persuade him to ban the magazine and close the box by that means when they could not do it by direct action. He had no love for the PO anyway and conse- quently told me to have my attorney file a petition for termination of probation. He did so and when it came to court the judge ended the whole thing in 5 minutes.

Armed with that, when I was in the east a few months later I just decided to do a little educating of the boys down in Washington and made a special trip down there to talk to Mr. Montegue then the Chief Postal Inspector. He listened politely and turned me over to the head of the "Mailability" section. I gave him the full treatment for about 2 hours straight. I had a lot of letters from readers (minus identification naturally), plus the letters of good reference I'd gotten for the probation hearing from various important people who had known me for years, plus various pieces of professional material on the subject and laid it (and him) out. During previous months I had gotten quite a bit of feedback about the PO inspectors pouncing on various TVs in various places. But after this trip to Washington I got very few indications that the inspectors were continuing to give anyone a hard time. So apparently my visit changed the course of postal events.

In 1962 I made an arrangement with a person known to the old timers as Bob Stevens or Barbara Elin Stevens to work with me on a profit sharing basis. Back in 1958 or 59, Bob and I had written about going in to business together and publishing a magazine when he was in Nashville, Tenn. and had access to an offset press. He subse- quently left there and thus plans to do anything collectively were forgotten. I started publishing TVia on my own and two years later Bob moved to California. He was well acquainted with advertising procedures and we made an agreement that he would promote the magazine and handle its mailing in exchange for a 25% share of the profits. Subsequently, as he took over a lot of the work involved and

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