Columnists: Yesterday’s Globe-Trotter

In 1936, a Scripps-Howard reporter named Herbert Roslyn Ekins won a race around the world on commercial aircraft by finishing his trip in a little more than 18 days. For that uncomplicated era his was a respectable feat; by rights it should have earned Ekins permanent registry in journalism’s memory book. But when “Bud” Ekins died last week at 62, and his death was engraved on obituary pages from coast to coast, it reminded most readers, who had long forgotten him, of one of his competitors whom he beat back to New York by a comfortable six days. Her name was Dorothy Kilgallen.

Once Dorothy got into the act, Ekins and the other reporter involved, the New York Times’s Leo Kieran, never really had a chance. Just like a woman, Dorothy came in late. Ekins and Kieran had already booked passage to Frankfort on the Zeppelin Hindenburg’s last flight that year when Dorothy decided to join them. She was then a 23-year-old crime reporter for Hearst’s New York Evening Journal, and she had never reached an altitude more dizzying than Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, near her home. “Oh, golly, to go around the world!” she said to Journal City Editor Amster Spiro, who saw the possibilities. He gave her $2,000 in cash and told her to take off on the assignment.

Swell! The Journal shed manly tears at her departure—”Against the well-planned schedules of her rivals, Dorothy has only her wits and the brave heart that beats under her trim little jacket”—and proudly published the note that came fluttering down from the Hindenburg’s gondola in Lakehurst, N.J.: “Goodbye, America. I’ll be right back.” In Frankfort 58 hours later, Dorothy was given a royal welcome by Nazi General Franz von Epp, Governor General of Bavaria, who called himself her “godfather in Germany” and suggested another date. But Dorothy pressed on.

Beneath her black patent-leather opera pumps, the world unreeled at a giddy 100-m.p.h. pace. Her dispatches home, most of them decorated by the Journal with three-column glamour portraits of the author, were breathless with excitement and punctuated largely by exclamation marks: “Rome looked swell in the late twilight!” “Those Italian military uniforms are wonderful!” “I loved Italy, but Greece takes the cake for magnificent beauty!” “The Near East reeks with romance!” “Just think—tomorrow I’ll breakfast in Basra, lunch in Bahrein and have my dinner at Sharjah!”

The traveler from Brooklyn did not lose her head entirely over such exotic enchantments. The Rhine, “for all its pretty white houses and for all its musty castles, can’t touch the Hudson!” She met six sheiks but was unimpressed. “I prefer a nice Yale man.” Sightseeing in Alexandria was on the dull side: “If anybody at a party ever asks me if I’ve seen a catacomb I can say yes, but that’s about all I got out of the experience.”

What Have I Done? All three news men were heading for an Oct. 16 rendezvous in Manila, a date that coincided with the inaugural passenger flight of Pan American’s China Clipper to the U.S. But Scripps-Howard’s Ekins, sneaking into town first, talked his way aboard a test run and got safely home while Kilgallen and Kieran were still in Manila.

But Bud Ekins’ victory could not tarnish the luster of the also-ran. The Hearst papers sent a covey of reporters west to greet Dorothy, among them her father, James Kilgallen. Everybody wept. “Waiting, waiting,” sobbed Hearst Sob Sister Elsie Robinson in print: “What’s the big idea—I’m not supposed to cry, just because I’m a newspaper woman . . . So, as I was saying—there came the Clipper and there came Dorothy—who looks, as I’ve said plenty of times before, exactly like Minnie Mouse.”

“She set out to do what a man could do and, at 23, she did it,” exulted the Journal. “The stories of her flight came to the EVENING JOURNAL and in none of them was there anything except a jest at the unseen one who traveled with her and who always laughs last. Men call him Death.” At a city hall reception, Dorothy bent to kiss New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and then dashed off several reprises of her trip. “Well, what have I done?” she asked her readers. “I’m the first woman to have flown around the world. I circumnavigated the globe in 24 days, twelve hours and 51 minutes. This is almost three times as fast as Nellie Ely.-It’s been a thrill!” Then she added: “I find to my surprise that I’m somewhat of a celebrity. It’s not going to little Dorothy’s head, however.”

The grateful Journal doubled her salary to $100 a week and sent her off for three months in Hollywood, a celebrity among celebrities. “It was the turning point of my life,” says Dorothy today. And so it was. In 1938, on the death of O. O. Mclntyre, the Journal’s Broadway columnist, the paper passed over a field of eager contenders to bestow Mclntyre’s mantle on the little girl from Brooklyn who had talked her way around the world. Bud Ekins, by then, was roving the Far East for U.P. When he died last week he was editor-publisher of the Schenectady, N.Y., Union-Star.

* A New York World reporter, who in 1889 completed the trip in 72 days, 6 hr. and 11 min. to beat the fanciful record of Phileas Fogg, hero of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days.