This is really in the newspaper family around this village but you might as well know about it.
    The other afternoon papers treated themselves this week to an orgy of sweet remembrances about how they sniffed out the funny business on the quiz shows ever so long ago and sent up all the necessary smoke signals.
    Mr. Hearst's TV man remembered that he had the Herb Stempel story all sewed up in 1957, so Mr. Howard's TV girl rushed to her front page with her own memoir: she smelled the strong odor of fix in April, 1957, and said so right in the paper.
    Splendid. Everybody did a fine job and everybody is privileged to squeeze in at the head of the class if room permits.
    All we want to do is set forth here the role played by the New York Post in this tawdry saga from the television badlands, just so the record is reasonably straight.
    Start with this:
    + Nobody pried the lid off the quiz show scandal but District Attorney Hogan--and he did it because of a story he read here on Aug. 18, 1958. On that day CBS killed "Dotto" and The Post laid bare the story behind it. A standby contestant (Eddie Hilgemeier, not named at the time) had charged that a "Dotto" winner had been pre-fed her answers. "That story stimulated our interest," Hogan said on Aug. 25, "and I decided to look into it."
    + Federal Communications Commissioner Doerfer told the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight last Saturday that the FCC's first information about the rigging of the quiz shows came from The Post. Doerfer said that Post reporter Jack O'Grady laid the story of the "Dotto" fix on his desk on July 31, 1958 -- 18 days before CBS dumped the show.
    The "Dotto" story happens to be the one that blew the lid off, as they say in our profession when they're talking about their scoops. Hilgemeier was the bust-out "Dotto" contestant who started it all. The Post got his affidavit, Frank Hogan stepped in, "Twenty-One" came under scrutiny on the heels of "Dotto" and then, and only then, the whole shaky structure of the TV Gold Rush began to crumble.
    And that brings us to Herbert Stempel.
    The first tip that "Twenty-One" was not a contest but a fixed piece of show business came to The Post from an anonymous girl informant in March, 1957. The girl said that Herb Stempel, ahead $49,500, had lost to Charles Van Doren strictly on orders from the Barry & Enright office, the producers of the show.
    The Post assigned David Gelman to the story. He got Stempel and he got Stempel's story. He couldn't get the kind of proof or corroboration that would satisfy the Post's attorneys that the story was libel-free. Somebody put the Journal on Stempel's trail after that but their reporters couldn't get it past their libel lawyers either.
    On Aug. 28, 1958, after Mr. Stempel paid a visit to the Hogan truth factory, The Post revealed that "Twenty-One" (not named in the story, again because of the libel laws) had come under investigation. The Journal had that, too. The next day all the evening papers (The World-Telegram went to it one edition ahead, if memory serves) were able to name Stempel and reveal that he had bared his soul to the D.A.
    The Stempel story, as it happened, didn't knock "Twenty-One" off the air. Barry & Enright evidently managed to persuade NBC that the man's testimony was beyond belief.
    But The Post then came up with an added starter, James Snodgrass, an artist who reached the $4,000 plateau on "Twenty-One" before he was dumped, also charged that the program was fixed, but he backed up his story with three sealed letters which contained answers and stage directions for his appearances on the tired blood quiz in mid-1957. Snodgrass had mailed the letters to himself before he went on the air. The Post broke his story under the by-lines of William Greaves and Jack O'Grady on Sept. 26, 1958, and NBC killed "Twenty-One" three weeks later, on Oct. 16.
    That's the story, so help us. We just wanted to join in the taking of the bows; there is glory to burn in this wonderful business of ours.