The Press: Ill-tempered Clavichord

Few of the great names that once reported football still wrote their bylines on the sports pages last week. In the New York Sun and some 125 other papers Grantland Rice went on murmuring genteel phrases that made football sound as leisurely as golf, as intellectual as chess. But Damon Runyan had become a general columnist and short-story writer; so had Paul Gallico. Westbrook Pegler discoursed solemnly about politics, as did Heywood Broun. William O’Connell McGeehan and Ring Lardner were dead.

Of the few veterans that remained, one of the best-paid and most eccentric was Bill Cunningham, temperamental sports artist of the Boston Post. Not syndicated, he filed a tax return last year on an income of $50,000. His salary from the Post was $21,000; the rest he got from magazine articles, lectures, radio broadcasting and assorted chores.

A prodigious worker, Bill Cunningham does his column every day, for Sunday produces six columns on Saturday’s football game. On Sunday too he writes a full-length feature story about any subject that comes into his head. An average day brings him 70 letters, and all of them get answered anywhere from a week to a couple of months later. In his 17 years with the Post he has never taken a vacation.

In a profession notorious for the latitude it allows its writers, Bill Cunningham writes absolutely as he pleases. On the day after Britain declared war on Germany he began his column: “There’s blood on the paper this morning.” That day (as frequently happens) he had nothing at all to say about sports. “They bury a world when they go to war,” wrote Bill Cunningham, who knew. “Yeah. Walk softly, and with your hat in your hand.”

Born in Dallas, Tex., Bill was captain of a prep-school (Terrill) football team that overwhelmed 114-0 another team on which played Bo McMillin and Red Weaver, stars of a great Centre College eleven a few years after; went on to Dartmouth with a football scholarship, made Walter Camp’s All-America second team in his senior year. Meanwhile he had spent two years in France as a first lieutenant of Artillery.

Back in Texas, Elijah William Cunningham went to work as a reporter for the Dallas News, at the same time coached Southern Methodist University’s football team. One of his jobs as a reporter was to interview Arctic Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Bill, married only a few days, took his bride along to impress her. But Stefansson was irritable. Said he: “If you are any kind of reporter you won’t need to take notes.” Thereupon he tore through a staccato monologue, dismissed his interviewer.

Hopping mad, Bill Cunningham went back to the office to write a blistering story about Stefansson. On the way, his wife handed him some sheets of paper. It was the interview, taken down in shorthand behind the explorer’s back. Bill had not known his wife could take shorthand, because he had never met her (except for a few minutes before a football game) until the day they were married. He had called her by long-distance telephone at her home in Attleboro, Mass., to transact some other business, ended by asking her to marry him. As for the interview, Stefansson later wrote Bill a letter and said it was the greatest piece of reporting he had ever seen.

One day in 1922 the Boston Post wired Bill, asked him to cover a post-season football game between Texas A. & M. and Centre College. The Post wanted 500 words. That day the great Bo McMillin was married, his bride sat wrapped in a blanket on the players’ bench with a corsage pinned to her shoulder, and unknown A. & M. licked Centre 18-6. Bill started sending in his story, paused after 1,500 soulful words to ask whether they wanted him to stop. Back came the Post’s answer: “Pour it on.” So Bill sent another 1,500 words.

About that time Mrs. Cunningham decided that Texas summers were too hot. Bill wrote to the Post, asked for a job at $50 a week (the Dallas News was paying him $55) and got it. But when he opened his first pay envelope in Boston he found $75. “There’s been a mistake,” Bill told his Sports Editor. “I’m only making $50.” Said the Sports Editor: “Keep it, you dumb bastard—that’s what you should have asked for in the first place.” Bill kept it. He has never had to ask the Post for a raise.

Bill Cunningham is no scholarly sportswriter like John Kieran of the New York Times. He is fast (in two hours he can file 3,000 words on a championship fight without ruffling his sandy hair), and has a flair for embroidering them with sentiment and drama.

There was the time a struggling Notre Dame team came East and whipped Army 7-0. Bill Cunningham said the reason was that years before, when Notre Dame’s immortal George Gipp lay dying, he had called for Knute Rockne. “If things ever get too tough for Notre Dame,” Gipp was supposed to have said, “ask the boys to score one for Gipper.” Rockne had saved this one for a special occasion. On the day when Notre Dame met Army, he let the boys have it between halves. According to Bill Cunningham, as Notre Dame’s back plunged over for the winning touchdown, the Army line could hear him mutter: “There’s one for you, Gipper!” When another newsman later asked Knute Rockne what he told the boys that day, Rockne scratched his head and answered: “I just said, ‘Watch Cagle.’ ”

Few of Bill’s colleagues like his bluster and bravado. But whatever they think of Bill personally, Boston newsmen will admit that he has an immense following. It has been estimated that if Cunningham changed his job it would cost the Post 100,000 readers.

He does his work in a one-room studio that overlooks Boston Common and the Charles River. In one corner is a Dartmouth pennant, facing it the pennant of his Texas prep school. On the floor is a rug woven for Bill, with a facsimile of his signature sprawled across one end, an image of a long-horn Texas steer at the other.

His Beacon Hill hideaway is popularly supposed to be a scene of secret orgies between Bill Cunningham and a mythical secretary named Ima Smack that Bill once invented to explain his delay in answering letters. One day a Boston department-store executive gave Bill a life-size wax model of Miss Smack. Bill stretched her out among the littered papers on his couch, with her skirts up and a champagne glass in her hand, horrified an old gentleman who came to see him. Bill tried to explain that Miss Smack was a model, but the old gentleman went away muttering: “Your private life is none of my business, young man.”