Press: Gallico to INS

To a farflung newspaper career already the envy of many a workaday reporter, Paul Gallico last week began another chapter. Back from his snuggery-workshop on the English Channel, Writer Gallico entered the employ of William Randolph Hearst’s International News Service. A high-priced super roving reporter, Paul Gallico, whose loyal readership followed him from the sport section of the New York News to the Saturday Evening Post, took as his assignment the Philadelphia child-murder case, described the arraignment of a 19-year-old girl defendant with true sob-stuff.

A rolling stone who has picked up considerable polish as he revolved through a number of phases of the publishing business, Paul Gallico was born to an Italian musician in a boarding house. He worked his way through Columbia University as a North River stevedore, Metropolitan Opera usher, gym teacher and German tutor. In his spare hours he played baseball, football, was acting captain of the 1921 Columbia crew after a two-year hitch in the Navy. Somehow he found plenty of time to turn out pulp magazine stories and short newspaper fiction.

Barely out of Columbia, he married red-headed Alva Taylor. Because he was the son-in-law of a famed Chicago Tribune columnist, the late Bert Leston Taylor, Gallico was made welcome on the Tribune’s New York cousin, lusty Daily News. Hired to review movies, he was soon kicked downstairs to the sports department where he reigned as editor and columnist for 14 years, including a brief spell when he was also assistant managing editor. He painfully learned skiing, flying and other sports he wrote about. It made good copy.

In 1936 Sports Columnist Gallico quit the News and was divorced by his second wife, who, as the daughter of Sobsister Adela Rogers St. Johns, comes from an-other celebrated newspaper family. He fictionized stories he had heard as personal experiences in the news rooms of the News, wrote his Farewell to Sports* for Hearst’s Cosmopolitan. When he became bored with freelancing last January, the News rehired him at an ordinary reporter’s salary to do general assignments, among them the Fisher Body sitdown in Detroit. But stories like that do not break every day.

After four months big, footloose Paul Gallico again resigned from the News, went back to England on savings from magazine writing, after having met Mr. Hearst. In Publisher Hearst he saw “the last of the great kings” for whom “every newspaper man ought to work at least once if his career is to be complete.”

*To be published in book form by Alfred A. Knopf next spring.