The Press: Reporter Rogers

Last week in St. Louis, death from heart failure came to John T. Rogers of the Post-Dispatch and ended the career of the last authentic Star Reporter of national renown. Fifty-five when he died, Reporter Rogers had worked on the Post-Dispatch for 20 years, on other papers for 13 before that. If his exploits are made the basis for a melodramatic newspaper film, the script will require the addition of no synthetic excitement, for Reporter Rogers’ professional life was as adventurous as they come.

To Reporter Rogers, sprawling St. Louis and its adjacent territory was as familiar as a backyard to a housewife. In high & low circles, friendly Rogers had hundreds of confidential contacts, known in newspaper shops as “pipelines.” So persuasive was he that he sometimes was able to mesmerize criminals into confessions which made jailing or hanging evidence for the prosecutor as well as scoops for the Post-Dispatch.

In 1922, Rogers went to investigate the disappearance of two planters near Mer Rouge, La. Working like a detective, he soon suspected that the men had been liquidated by the Ku Klux Klan. He bearded the local Exalted Cyclops, got from him the admission that this theory was right. Reporter Rogers traced the missing planters to Bayou La Fourche. Dynamiting brought the men’s bodies swirling to the surface while Rogers and National Guardsmen stood by.

Most remarkable criminal confession obtained by Reporter Rogers was in the middle 1920s, when Charles Birger and his gunmen were terrorizing “Bloody Williamson” County in southern Illinois. Impressing the Birger mob by his revolver marksmanship on empty beer bottles, Reporter Rogers became so chummy with a thug named Arthur Newman that in 1927 Newman confessed to the Post-Dispatch how he and Birger had murdered State Policeman Lory Price and his wife. Officials had never been able to find Mrs. Price’s body; Rogers’ revelations located it in an abandoned mine shaft. Newman was jailed for life. Charlie Birger went to the gallows.

Same year (1927) Reporter Rogers received the Pulitzer Prize for the ousting of Federal Judge George W. English of East St. Louis. Four years later Rogers rescued Dr. Isaac D. Kelley from mysterious St. Louis kidnappers. All St. Louis wondered about the Kelley case. Reporter Rogers solved it early in 1934 when a “pipeline” produced news that implicated Mrs. Nellie Tipton Muench and others (TIME, May 11, 1931, et seq.).

Lanky, agreeable, fond of talking about himself, Reporter Rogers was well paid, drew many a big bonus for big stories. Once an unknown benefactor deposited $1,000 in the Rogers checking account. At Christmas his mailbox so overflowed with cards and gifts that once he remarked: “The whores and hoodlums always remember me!”