The Press: The Wonder Boys

Hearst’s raucous Chicago Herald-American would love to revive the dear, noisy days of the Front Page era, if only it could remember how. Last week it made a loud try.

It started when two Chicago policemen, sad-faced Captain Thomas Connelly and natty Lieut. William Drury, were suspended from the force. Their superiors suspected them of being too gentle with gamblers. To Chicago’s frenetic Hearstlings* this looked like an opportunity too good to be missed. The Herald-American forced a few crocodile tears down its face, and did its best to make martyred heroes of Connelly and Drury. Then it hired them as reporters. Oldtime Police Reporter Leroy (“Buddy”) McHugh, a veteran of Front Page days, was assigned to help them out. Then Connelly and Drury were turned loose.

They interviewed policemen’s wives, as part of a Herald-American crusade for pay raises for cops. But when they started snooping around the Case of the Murdered Bride, all the other news of the day was shoved back among the goiter-cure ads. The story was a natural: the victim had worked as a dice girl in a gin mill and she had been married just two days. When she was found dead in a ditch, the hunt for her husband was on. Connelly and Drury found him. While the Herald-American pulled out all the stops (HERO REPORTERS REVEAL HUSBAND’S OWN STORY), they kept him out of sight, gave him up to the police only after they had found out everything they wanted to know.

In Chicago’s ceaseless scuffle for the attention of newspaper buyers, ex-Cops Connelly and Drury were proving to be circulation pullers. “All you gotta do is use your head,” said Reporter Drury.

Marshall Field’s rival Chicago Sun went tabloid this week, dropped its price a cent, and found a neat answer to a perennial breakfast table question: Who gets the paper? The Sun sports and financial sections were contained in a “pullout,” which husbands could take to the office, leaving the rest unmussed for the missus. For suggesting the idea, Sports Editor Dick Hackenberg got a $600 bonus.

* One of whom once told his staff: “The boss says he’s getting tired of old cliches. We gotta get a lotta new cliches.”