The Press: Old Timers

On his way to San Francisco for the convention of the American Newspaper Guild, of which he is president, Columnist Heywood Broun last week took a sideswipe at the employer who is soon to unemploy him. Said he:

“I don’t want to stir up any bitter feeling about foreign nations lying to the west of us, but I do say that I would regret to see further aggression on the part of a nation all of whose admirals and generals seem to look precisely like Roy W. Howard.”

Last fortnight Columnist Broun advertised for a job (TIME, July 31), thereby publicly setting himself up as the No. 1 example of an oldtime newspaperman whose career has followed the conventional graph (reporter to critic to columnist) and who now needs work. There are thousands like him, for the number of U. S. daily newspapers had decreased by 211 in a decade. Time was when a good man could always get a job and the itinerant newspaperman was one of the most colorful figures in the land. He was hard-drinking, amorous, industrious when sober, able whether sober or drunk. Today these footloose reporters and copyreaders have nearly all died or settled down. The old timers who are left look back with nostalgia on the gaudier days of their profession, but stick to their jobs if they have jobs. Luckier than Newspaperman Broun last week were these hoary and, in their spheres, famed and typical oldtimers:

Police Reporter Kenneth George Bellairs returned from his vacation to the St. Louis police department, which he has covered, off & on, for one paper or another, since 1891. Son of a British Army captain who came to the U. S. to grow beans and ran the St. Louis zoo instead, Jock Bellairs went to work for the old St. Louis Globe in 1890, when he was 21. He left the Globe for the Chronicle, left the Chronicle for the Post-Dispatch, left the Post-Dispatch to return to the Star-Chronicle, which, as the Star-Times, now pays him his salary. Sitting in the press room at headquarters one day in 1898, Reporter Bellairs heard four bombs go off, the Chronicle’s signal to the city that the Spanish-American War had started. Said he jokingly: “In a few minutes the phone will ring and it’ll be Tarbell telling me that I’m to cover the war.” In a few minutes the phone did ring and Managing Editor David Tarbell told surprised Jock Bellairs that he was to cover the war. Correspondent Bellairs scooped Richard Harding Davis and many another prima donna on the attack on the U. S. torpedo-boat Winslow, returned to St. Louis a newspaperman’s hero, went back to covering police. Around him have been woven some of the best-known newspaper apocrypha of that newspaperman’s town. Samples:

>Bellairs and his colleagues on the police beat used to accost farmers bringing produce to the city, demand a license for each separate vegetable, give the frightened farmers mock trials in the press room at headquarters, fine them, buy whiskey with the booty.

>Bellairs & friends once borrowed the corpse of a Chinese from the morgue, took it to a saloon, ordered plenty of drinks, left the Chinese to pay the bill. The bartender shook the Chinese to awaken him, knocked him down, tried desperately to hide the body while Bellairs & Co., peering through the window, howled with ribald glee.

>One night, after drinking a little too much, Reporter Bellairs tried to drive a horse & buggy across the Mississippi River.

These stories Jock Bellairs denies with a twinkle in his eye. His more sober exploits he will admit. He helped to convict Playboy Arthur Duestrow of killing his wife and child in one of St. Louis’ most famed murder cases. He has covered 15 hangings, innumerable murders, never a lynching. Once he heard there were going to be two lynchings in one night, picked the wrong one, never got another chance. Paul Y. Anderson, Marcus Wolf, Herbert Bayard Swope and Theodore Dreiser were all St. Louis cubs when Jock Bellairs was a veteran. In A Book About Myself, Dreiser puzzled over Bellairs’ “curious compound of indifference, wisdom, literary and political sense,” the whiskey bottle he kept in his pocket “to save time.”

But Jock Bellairs had a wife whom he loved and she had to have a leg amputated. From that day on he gave up drinking and settled down. At 70 he is a conservative, steady, hard-working newspaperman who not only covers police but, under the name of Verdino, writes a daily column on fishing and hunting, and finds time to act as secretary of the St. Louis Newspaper Guild. He is going to write his memoirs, if he can ever find the time.

Copyreader. Sitting in the slot of the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise is a husky, blue-eyed, partly deaf Irishman named Carl Shannon, who left a good job as draftsman and designer in a Pittsburgh steel mill to become a newspaperman. After a turn in Pittsburgh he went to New York, landed a job as ship’s news reporter by swearing he had been a ship’s news reporter in Denver. From New York he went to Albany, then took to the road, working sometimes as reporter, sometimes as slot-&-rim man. He followed carnivals as pressagent, married a carnival girl. Once in Oklahoma City he got what he called “a eatin’ job” selling tea from house to house. He made $120 the first week, $140 the second week, $135 the third week, quit the fourth week to take a $35 job on a paper.

Carl Shannon’s reporting days ended when he misquoted Jim Reed in the Kansas City Star and his city editor found out he was growing deaf. Two decades of tramping from one paper to another wound him up in the town of Harlingen, Texas, where Colonel S. P. Etheredge found him 20 years ago and hired him as telegraph editor for his Enterprise. Shannon stayed put for three years, then went to New Orleans. Five months later he wired Publisher Etheredge that he was tired of wandering, would rather live in Beaumont than any place on earth. He got his job back and has been there ever since—in spite of occasional carouses (for which he would always apologize in 2,000-word letters), in spite of threats to inefficient assistants to “come around the desk and get you,” in spite of a sit-down strike he once conducted to get a good assistant a raise. Shannon took the assistant out to a park bench and sat there with him until the raise went through.

Nowadays Carl Shannon is the highest paid man on his paper, next to the editor-in-chief. He is neat, careful, dignified and exacting. He will pass no headline that begins or ends with a preposition, and to him all two-letter words are prepositions. He expects to spend the rest of his life on the Enterprise and says: “I’m too old to be changing jobs any more.” His friends think he is older than the 57 years he confesses to, but admit that he might just look older.

Photographer Harold Field Smith was back in Seattle last week after chasing two bloodhounds through the Cascades for his paper, the Times. Famed throughout the Northwest are Smitty’s high, fiendish laughter, his admiration for pregnant women (“I love ’em! God, I love ’em”), the hissing gibberish he talks to visiting Japanese dignitaries, his bounding glandular energy. To get a picture of the late Queen Marie of Rumania, Smitty grabbed the royal thigh and held the Queen in her automobile. To get a picture of Rachmaninoff he played Chopsticks on the master’s piano until he gave up and posed. To Schumann-Heink he said: “Show your teeth, mamma.”

Smitty sneers at young photographers who talk about angles, shadows and art. He has been in the business for 37 years and he just takes pictures. His judgment of distance is so good that he can pick out an object yards away and estimate its size and distance within a fraction of an inch. On an assignment he shows swimmers how to swim, prizefighters how to fight, baseball players how to run bases. When Dottie Dee (now of Sally Rand’s ranch) described how she put on gold paint for her dance, Smitty said she did that wrong.

Born in England, Smitty got into photography in 1902 by inviting what he thought were ladies into his studio for portrait work. He went to Canada in 1911 and did military photography. The War took him to Camp Lewis, Wash., where he made lots of money taking pictures of soldiers in uniform to be sent home to wives and sweethearts. He joined the Times in 1917.

He drives madly, with band music going full blast on the radio of his car. He keeps time by jumping up and down in his seat and pounding on the knee of his companion. When he crashed into a police car in downtown Seattle, he jumped out and began dressing down the cops, threatening to have them fired. His face was cut and he had a broken collarbone, and all the time he was taking pictures.

His disrespect for the law has encouraged many a timid reporter. To interview a Japanese arriving on a ship, Smitty once raced the entire length of a dock with both horns of his car blasting the air, scattering police, dock guards, customs officers, longshoremen and the personal bodyguard of the Japanese. Finally he pulled up at the gangplank, jumped out and bowed to the Japanese, muttering and hissing.

Smitty is proudest of his house and his accordion. Of all the rooms in his house he likes the bathroom best. He is also fond of the recreation room in his basement, in which the first thing visitors see is a large sign saying: “IF YOU ARE SO SMART WHY AIN’T YOU RICH?”

Photographer Smith will not admit he is getting old. His hair is greying, but he still walks briskly, makes the most of his five feet five. (His small head, thick neck and beakish nose make him look something like an upright turtle.) But even when he is through with newspapering, Smitty will be all right. He claims he has $50,000 put away. His wife disapproves of him, except when he plays the accordion.

Newsboys are also newspapermen, and a true old timer is San Antonio’s Horace Greeley J. Heckman, a stoop-shouldered, loose-jointed, slap-happy gaffer of 64, who has been selling the Light on the corner of Travis and North St. Mary’s Streets for the past 17 years. Newsboy Heckman says he is an M.A. (for Master Accountant), has worked in eight banks and sold newspapers in New York, California, Mexico, South America and at the Paris Exposition of 1900. He wears an old straw hat and baggy breeches, drinks “sulfur water” out of a whiskey bottle he carries in his apron pocket. Newsboy Heckman makes his appearance running down the street yelling: “Light’s out! Light’s out!” He interprets the headlines to suit himself. Last week, by force of invective, he got rid of a Mexican competitor who could read no English and shouted nothing but “Beeg Wreck!”

Feeling pleased with himself about that, Newsboy Heckman next set about selling his papers, delivering himself thuswise: “They’re scrapping the treaties! They’ll scrap anything! But they CAIN’T scrap the LORD! He’s here to stay! John L. Lewis shouldn’t ‘a’ done it! Old Cactus Jack is all right! My Goodness! My Goodness!”

Catching sight of a young woman, Newsboy Heckman accompanied her for half a block, declaring: “The Lord’s your shepherd! The Lord’s your shepherd! My Goodness, you’re getting better looking every day!” After such outbursts police often take him to jail to cool off for a spell.