The Press: Broadway Columnist

William Randolph Hearst used to say that a man who could write about sports could write about anything. Many a good newspaperman, many a prose stylist started as a sports writer. Ring Lardner, Heywood Broun once followed big-league ball clubs around the circuit; and sharp-tongued Pundit Westbrook Pegler was a vinegar-tongued sports columnist for eight years.

This week another sports reporter, who became a short-story writer, war correspondent, poet and columnist, celebrated his 40th year as a newspaperman: tall, affable Damon Runyon, specialist in the mad gibberish of Broadway.

Runyon was born in Manhattan, Kans., 1,200 miles from Broadway’s Manhattan. When the U. S. declared war on Spain, Damon was 13. He lied his way into the Army, served two years in the Philippines. In September 1900 he got his first job as a reporter for the Pueblo, Colo. Star. After holding jobs on a succession of Western papers, Runyon was hired as a sports writer by Hearst’s New York American.

For twelve years, starting in 1911, Sportsman Runyon traveled with New York’s ball clubs, the Giants and Yankees. Like most top-notch sports writers, he ignored technical details of the games he covered, concentrated on color. From time to time he got other assignments. Runyon was one of four accredited war correspondents in Mexico with Pershing in 1916. He followed the U. S. Army overseas, reported the battles of the Meuse and Argonne. Back in Manhattan, Runyon, always interested in boxing, helped Mike Jacobs to wrest the heavyweight monopoly from Madison Square Garden.

In 1932 Damon took up fiction again, reeled off a succession of stories about race-track hangers-on, fighters, screwy Broadway blondes. He took one block on Broadway (between 49th and 50th Streets) as his territory, made half a million dollars writing about it. Three years ago Hearst’s King Features’ syndicated his column, The Brighter Side, in which he writes about anything that interests him in the Broadway jargon that makes sense to his readers.

Runyon’s prose has a peculiar fascination for Britons. The London Evening Standard holds the British rights to all his fiction. Five volumes of Runyon short stories have been gobbled up in Britain, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand. London’s Cockneys and duchesses glibly repeat Runyon’s Broadwayese, talking tough, from the corners of their mouths.

Runyon gave up drinking 30 years ago, broods on the fact that people who knew him in Denver remember just one thing about him: how much he drank. “That’s fame,” says Runyon ruefully. His worst vice now is smoking. Last week he got a letter from a woman in Seattle, who said she had seen him once as a small boy in short pants, with garters above the knee. “The worst thing is,” said Runyon, “that when she saw me I was smoking a cigaret.”