The Press: Accosting on the Street

New York City’s Brobdingnagian Daily News (1,948,759 daily, 3,483,616 Sunday) has finally identified its most popular feature. Its research cost $45,000 and took a year, during which 500-odd different readers were polled every week. Away out in front in the reader-interest race: the Inquiring Fotographer column conducted by Jimmy Jemail on the editorial page.

During the past two decades underslung James Jemail, 47, tipping his hat and toting his 2¼ by 3¼ Speed Graphic, has accosted, questioned and photographed at least 150,000 people. More than 50,000 of his pictures, six to a column and each accompanied by its 50-word answer to the question of the day, have been published.

Typical question: “Do you agree that a woman is ugliest when drunk?” Typical answer: “. . . if a woman is one-half or two-thirds drunk she can be a very amusing companion and entirely agreeable. Just don’t give her any more liquor. And send her to me.” On an average of once a week Jimmy throws his contributors a serious question on current affairs, but usually his queries are pretty jaunty.

Once he inquired: “What aid to feminine beauty do you detest most?” Prompt was the answer of a frustrated male: “Bust developers made of sponge rubber.” On another occasion he posed the question: “Did you ever kiss a man with a beard, and what reaction was there?” A girl replied: “Yes, when I was young and having my teeth straightened. Some of his whiskers caught in my wire brace, and he said ‘ouch.'”

Kissing questions have sometimes caused Jemail trouble. Working the public square of a large New Jersey town, Jimmy was arrested and thrown into a psychopathic ward for asking a middle-aged woman : “Do you remember your first kiss, and how did you enjoy it?”

He still carries a large lump in back of his left ear from approaching a pretty girl in Times Square during the ’20s. “Good afternoon, madam—” he had no more than begun when, blam!, something pile-driving hit him from behind. Jimmy turned over and literally threw a punch from the pavement. After the cops had pulled Jimmy out of the crowd and heard his explanation, they told him to beat it and returned to chafing the wrists and temples of the girl’s escort.

On another occasion in Times Square he inquired of an ornate damsel sitting in the back of a limousine with the top down: “Is the shimmy a moral and proper dance?” She answered in vehement affirmative. Her name turned out to be Gilda Gray.

Objection was once made to the high literary content of the questionees’ responses. Insisted a superior: “That taxi driver you ran this morning looks straight out of Sing Sing and you have him talking like Nicholas Murray Butler. Just put the words down as they come out of their mouths.” Jimmy obeyed, not sparing a single dese, dem or dose. Posses of furious questionees stormed the News, and the management frantically ordered Jimmy back to word-painting.

Son of a shoe manufacturer, Jimmy was born in Beirut, Syria and brought to the U.S. as a child by his parents, who chose Newport, R.I. as a new home town. Times were tough, and on Jimmy’s graduation from grammar school his father told him he could not continue his education, must become an apprentice barber. Instead Jimmy worked his way through high school, won an appointment to Annapolis.

He signed to enter Brown where he be came a four-letter athlete, received All-America mention from Walter Camp. During World War I he returned to the Navy, was at one time Admiral William Sowden Sims’s decoding aide.

Throughout all journalism’s history. Jimmy is the only janitor ever to become a columnist in a single day. In the spring of 1921, broke, he answered a News want ad for a copy boy who would sweep out on Sundays. On his first Sunday at work, Phil Payne, then city editor, asked him who he was, recognized his name as a famed footballer, gave him the Inquiring Fotographer assignment. The column was a transplanted Chicago Tribune feature, but it had always been assigned more or less at random to a staff writer accompanied by a cameraman, and Jimmy was the first ever to make it a solo career. He now owns three Greenwich Village apartment houses. Total income with News salary: around $12,000 annually.

“Jemail” in Arabic means “admirable,” and so admirable does his boss, Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, consider Jimmy that under way is a campaign to sell the column nationally.