The Press: Bumpkins’ Biographer

The businesslike Chicago Journal of Commerce (“All the News a Busy Man Has Time to Read”) ordinarily gets few letters from its busy readers. But last week the fan mail was steadily trickling in, as it does every time the Journal’s professional-bumpkin columnist, Chet Shafer, 59, writes his annual “winter piece.” A South Bend pipefitter called it “one of the finest pieces of prose I have ever seen.” An attorney on Chicago’s La Salle Street: “You nearly break a country boy’s heart.”

Columnist Shafer, a wise man in his way, explained: “Those successful men like to read about unsuccessful folks whose lives ain’t cluttered up.” For eleven years the Journal has been tucking away Chet Shafer’s daily two or three inches of bucolic “Three Rivers Doings” at the end of its editorials. One week in 1938 an editorial saboteur left it out. Hundreds of businessmen, from Detroit to Omaha, promptly wired, phoned and wrote angry protests. “Three Rivers Doings” has been running ever since.

Corn in the Cage. In the fact-&-figure heavy Journal of Commerce, Shafer’s column sticks out like a shock of corn in a bank teller’s cage. Its author, brother of Congressman Paul Shafer (R., Mich.), has worked on newspapers from San Francisco to Paris, but would rather live in his home town, Three Rivers, Mich. (pop. 6,710). Most of Chet’s columns are as casual as any street-corner conversation: they concern a funeral, a backyard spat, an old gaffer’s boyhood reminiscence, or plain cigar-store gossip. Sometimes he reports technological progress:

“An idea what to do to get along without a cistern has been successfully rigged up by Lena Bloom, over at the county seat, who turned about six feet of her downspout up so the rainwater runs into a washtub that sets on a barrel, and if there is a light shower she invariably gets enough in the tub to do a washing, but a heavy downpour will not only fill the tub but will overflow and fill the barrel. . . . With the downspout lifted, her supply is ample although she has some trouble getting the washtub, when it is full, down off the barrel. ‘I slop out a lot,’ says Lena.” “Somebody Loses.” The characters in Chet Shafer’s guileless anthology are seldom the local boys who made good. Some of his Rotarian fellow townsmen, who dislike his stuff because it makes Three Rivers out to be the queen of hick towns, have on occasion asked the Journal to throw him out. Chet dislikes them just as much. Says he: “Rotary ruins little towns like this. Gives them big-town ideas. Commerce! Progress! Whenever there’s progress, somebody loses.” Most of his characters come from the pinochle-playing crowd that hangs out in the back room of Rohrer’s cigar store—the town jeweler, the justice of the peace, the town’s fat man. They have long since learned to make a pretense of ignoring their Boswell, and to continue behaving conscientiously like Chet Shafer characters.

Each morning Shafer climbs to his “city news bureau” in a loft over Wittenberg’s newsstand. The floor is littered with years of overflow from his orange-crate “files,” the whole scene dominated by a huge stove and a headless, female cigar-store Indian. There Chet pecks out “Doings,” a paragraph of gossip for the local Commercial, and “straight stuff” for the Kalamazoo Gazette. Making his rounds, Chet is easy to spot: in winter by his coonskin hat and wolf coat, in summer by a flat fedora which he once had insured against fire, theft and collision.

Chet is also the founder and “grand diapason” of the Guild of Former Pipe Organ Pumpers (TIME, May 25, 1931), formed to combat the impression that all famous men earned their first dollars selling newspapers. He earned his at organ-pumping, and so did such distinguished members (Chet collected about 4,000 at $5 a “diploma”) as Ring Lardner, Julius Rosenwald and Jimmy Walker.

His Guild is dying out, and many of his old gaffers with it, but Chet has enough material in Three Rivers to last his lifetime. “There’ll always be somebody to write about,” he says. “Like Ossy Poe, who just died the other day. Only man in the world that liked horseradish on his doughnuts in the morning.”