The Press: One-Man Syndicate

One-Man Sundicate

Before the war made him famous, the late Ernie Pyle roamed the U.S. grinding out daily columns that were part travelogue, part a oneman Gallup poll, part homely philosophizing. Last week another short, shy newsman was making a career out of the same kind of dream assignment. Jack Dadswell’s column, “Roving with Dadswell,” only six months old, now appears in 40 little newspapers from Maine to Florida.

One difference between Pyle and Dadswell is that Pyle worked for Scripps-Howard, whose 19 dailies frequently left out Pyle’s pleasant prewar aimlessness. Columnist Dadswell, who is 51, is his own boss, as four syndicates who tried to sign him have discovered. He beats up his own material singlehanded, types it at 3 a.m. (he sleeps till noon), edits it at the nearest coffee shop (“the restaurants of the country are my workshops”), sells it, mimeographs and distributes it to his newspaper clients. He goes where he pleases, mostly in his own car, writes whatever his common-denominator instinct directs about each day’s wanderings. Last week he was hunting near St. Petersburg, Fla.

Chatter & Curiosity. When the whim takes him, Dadswell goes to sea, works in the black gang or deck crew, returns with human-interest yarns that set him solid with his plain-folks readers. He has none of the synthetic open-eyed wonder of the late O. 0. Mclntyre, or the troubled sympathy of Pyle. Says Dadswell: “I always have a specific story in mind when I make a trip. Soon I am going to Cuba to find out if Sloppy Joe’s is really sloppy and if a guy named Joe really runs it.”

Dadswell’s roving is the current phase of an old restlessness. He was 16 when he broke in as a columnist (“Village Gossip by the Boy Reporter”) on the old Chicago American. Two years later he scooped the U.S. press when he interviewed Bandit Pancho Villa in Mexico. Since then, on a dozen different papers, he has been in every newspaper slot from reporter to publisher-editor, with time out as photographer, newsreel cameraman, and front man for circuses.

Up & Down. For his thousands of plain followers, Dadswell has his own sort of glamor. Readers who might be sold the Brooklyn Bridge can warm up to the man who confesses that he bought a $5,000 diamond for $25 from a mysterious Mexican, discovered it was a zircon “not worth a buck.” He has the reckless savvy of the smart fellow who retires on his earnings (he did in 1926, 1938, 1945), and then shows up broke for a fresh start. But if his new column brings him another competence, Dadswell insists it will have to come from little papers. He has promised never to raise his rates ($10 monthly for papers under 10,000 circ.). In his growing string he is proudest of the Cambridge (Md.) Banner, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times and the Bradenton (Fla.) Herald, presumably because he thinks they are proud of him. Says Dadswell: “If the President of the United States walked into their offices and told them they could not run my column, they would tell him to go to hell.”