The Press: Understandable Man

Almost every rule in the newsman’s book is broken by “Roundy” Coughlin.

He writes whatever he happens to think of, in a free-flowing stream undammed by grammar or punctuation — and no copy desk corrects him. Example: “I suppose some won’t like this I don’t care if they do or not this is my opinion . . . that 45 cents for some of them drinks is terrible. . . . Some of this stuff they serve you now has drove more guys to the water wagon than any Lent in history.” Roundy Coughlin is Wisconsin’s most widely read home-grown philosopher. This week he started his 21st year on the State Journal of Madison with: “Here is a chance for the Journal to throw a little party for me. This is just a little reminder that is all everything is on the cuff” (Roundy is always drumming up free meals and drinks).

Big, brash Joseph Coughlin, 49, 204 lb., got to be a small-talk columnist a few years before Walter Winchell. At 24, Roundy was pushing a lawnmower in Madison’s Brittingham Park (he had quit school in the fifth grade, had been a dynamite hauler, telephone repairer, sledge-hammerer, semi-pro baseball pitcher). He started penciling names and items he heard around the park’s tennis courts and bathing beach, sold them as a weekly sports column to the Capital Times. The technique and Roundy’s idiom have not changed a bit in 25 years. The State Journal hired Roundy as a daily columnist in 1924, and let his murderous English go unarrested.

“The Old Lawnmower Pusher.” Roundy’s chief field is still sports (last football season he picked 153 winners, in 172 games; in this basketball season he has miscalled only two out of 50), but anything is likely to attract his punditry. He sums up the problem of teen age delinquency thus: “I don’t blame the men in service at all these young girls are up town to get picked up they get picked up alright that is their fault. . . . I can’t understand what is the matter with some of the parents some of these sixteen year old girls up town and out in the country all night. Maybe I am a little punchy and old fashioned but the old time parents they would knock your ears off if you wasn’t in.”

Roundy dubs himself “the old lawn-mower pusher.” He is as much a town character as a columnist, knows everybody, gripes at tavern prices, poses as a callous cynic while collecting hundreds of dollars for crippled children’s camps and other charities. His style is not a pose. He talks that way, dictates his column.

“Business . . . Right and Wrong.” Several years ago Roundy had two sets of cards printed — “Right Business” and “Wrong Business.” The bearer of a hard-luck story is handed the latter. The former is a hallmark of Roundy’s approbatipn. “Right business” has become a standard phrase in Wisconsin sports lingo.

The phenomenon of Roundy’s success constantly expands. Madison believes he can make or break a University of Wisconsin football coach (“Four football coaches were going to run me out of town but I’m still here and nobody knows where they are”). He averages more than three nights a week as a speaker, last year turned his rugged ribbing on the State Legislature.

Official recognition has recently come Roundy’s way: appointment to Wisconsin’s Boxing Commission. Roundy’s tenet as a public servant: “My views … is get good fighters in there and not hasbeens.

The Governor didn’t put me on there to be a dummy I’m speaking my piece. I don’t use big words but what I do use you can understand.”