Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [43]
Alfred once bet Hecht $2,000 that he couldn’t write a book in two days that would win critical praise and also sell more than 20,000 copies. Thirty-six hours later Hecht finished dictating a book that won the bet – The Florentine Dagger.
There were other well-known writers on the Chicago papers then: Ring Lardner and Westbrook Pegler of the Tribune sports staff, Jack Lait, Lowell Thomas, Burton Rascoe, and humorists George Ade, Finley Peter (“Mr. Dooley”) Dunne, Bert Leston Taylor (“B. L. T.”), and the widely loved Franklin P. Adams (”F. P. A.” as he later signed his column in New York).
There was Robert J. Casey, Daily News reporter now retired, who made famous such wry leads as these:
“Anna Marie Hahn’s 11 husbands came to court today – 10 of them in glass jars and one in a blue serge suit.”
And after Richard Loeb was stabbed to death in Statesville Prison, in what was alleged to be a homosexual quarrel:
“Richard Loeb, who graduated from college with honors at the age of 15 and who was a master of the English language, today ended his sentence with a proposition.”
And this, some time after Pearl Harbor Day, about his own boss, Daily News publisher Frank Knox who was then serving as Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Navy:
“The Navy has just raised the eighth of the two ships which Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox said were sunk on Dec. 7.”
Ed Lahey, Casey’s former News colleague and now chief Washington correspondent for the Knight Newspapers, is one of the few today who still writes in this manner. When “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, a golfing enthusiast, was slain near Eightieth Street on Chicago’s South Side, Lahey’s opening sentence read:
“Machine Gun Jack holed out last night. He died in the low Eighties.”
There were our noted cartoonists: John T. McCutcheon of the Tribune and Vaughn Shoemaker of the Daily News (both Pulitzer Prize winners), and Harry Hershfield, also of the Daily News. And later there was another News “comer,” a North Side kid who once chalked drawings on the blackboards at Senn High School – the pixyish, Pulitzer Prize winner Herbert L. (“Herblock”) Block, now of the Washington Post & Times-Herald.
And there were the distinguished theater critics, including the Tribune’s Burton Rascoe and Percy Hammond; the Daily News’ Amy Leslie, who was a friend of Stephen Crane and the wife of Frank (“Bring ‘em Back Alive”) Buck; and the Hearst Newspapers’ Ashton Stevens.
As long as there is an American theater, the beloved Ashton in particular will be remembered. A wiry, debonair man about town who had previously been a reviewer in San Francisco and New York, his carefully phrased opinions were read and respected by every major theatrical figure of the period. “The Mercy Killer,” as he was called, was critically uncompromising, and wonderfully good-humored.
Yet this doesn’t mean he couldn’t be mordant. After one opening night, during which a gangster had been murdered outside the theater, Stevens reported succinctly:
“They shot the wrong man.”
William Randolph Hearst wanted Stevens to return to New York. But Stevens found ample challenge in the exciting west-of-Broadway world of those days. Furthermore, he and his attractive wife Kay, a former actress whom he had met in Chicago, were comfortably established in the city. He remained a Chicagoan until his death in 1951.
One reason that Chicago journalism has been so distinctive is that a special pioneering breed of publishers and editors was developed in those early years.
There was S. Emory