The Press: Meat Makes News

Around Pittsburgh, Ray Sprigle (rhymes with wiggle) is known as a hard-digging, hell-for-leather newsman. He once had himself admitted to a psychopathic hospital, so that he could expose conditions there. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black remembers him as the man who went to Alabama in 1937, dug up Black’s past membership in the Ku Klux Klan, and won a Pulitzer Prize.

A gaudy, rustic-looking eccentric, Ray Sprigle has been wearing a ten-gallon sombrero for 15 years, ever since he went to Arizona to solve a Pittsburgh murder. The ten-gallon hat, a silver-ringed cane, and a fuming corncob pipe are the trademarks of the Post-Gazette’s 58-year-old star reporter. To disguise himself for his latest assignment—to expose Pittsburgh’s lively black market in meat—he gave up hat and cane, but not his pipe.

Sprigle changed his name to Alois Vondich, shaved off his moustache, bought a 69¢ cap, and smoked stogies whenever any black marketeer was looking. He got himself an old truck, and a “partner” who knew something about meat. Within three weeks he had bought from wholesalers (at about double the ceiling prices) nearly 1,300 pounds of beef, 176 pounds of veal, 250 pounds of smoked hams and pork shoulders, 225 pounds of bacon. A ton of meat was his goal, and he made it—without ever paying a red point. To show it could be done, he also bought 10,000 red stamps in the black market, at the going price of $6 a thousand.

His three-week spree cost his paper $2,000 (the Post-Gazette gave the meat to local hospitals). Out of it came a seven-day-wonder front-page series, featuring names & addresses of the local black marketeers.

After his first two articles appeared, the red-faced OPA subpoenaed Sprigle.

(Pittsburgh’s OPA had never used its subpoena power to go after a single Pitts burgh black marketeer.) Said the Post-Gazette’s Sprigle: we will report the story “in our own way and in our own good time. I shall tell you nothing. . . .

The record of the OPA is not such as to inspire confidence. . . . And I am quite willing to go to jail — immediately, if necessary.” OPA quickly decided that it would be less troublesome to buy a Post-Gazette each day to find what it wanted to know.

Reporter Sprigle was considerably disappointed at not being sent to jail. “That would give me a swell dateline,” he said.

Rush Job This week, just twelve days after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the first copies of a 250-page memorial book about him were on U.S. newsstands. No other book has ever been conceived and hatched so quickly.

Donald Porter Geddes (who is as large as the Walrus but resembles the Carpenter), editor of 25¢ Pocket Books, got the idea while listening to the radio the Thursday the President died. By the weekend his staff had rounded up, whipped into shape and sent to the printers the scripts of radio broadcasts, newspaper obituaries, selections from Roosevelt speeches, appropriate verse (including a made-to-radio-order poem by Carl Carmer and an old one by the late Stephen Vincent Benet), a hurriedly updated appraisal of Roosevelt by Historian Henry Steele Commager. As an enterprising stunt (print order: 300,000), Pocket Books’ Memorial made publishing history.