Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [46]
Of all the newspaper publishers and editors I have known down through the years – and I have known many – only two would qualify for the Hollywood version of the hard-bitten newspaperman. One was the late Walter Howie, a Hearst editor. He was the prototype of the dynamic, fire-snorting, stop-the-press editor in The Front Page.
I knew Walter and his wife Gloria only in the final stages of his career, when he had been dispatched back to Chicago by Hearst to revitalize the fading American. Howie tried desperately to save the paper, and frequently showed flashes of his old imaginative, inventive self. But it was too late. Times and conditions had changed. His era had ended.
I’ve already told a story about my other nominee – the late Louis Ruppel, who was managing editor of the Chicago Times when I was hired by sports editor Marvin McCarthy in late 1935. Ruppel was an imposing figure standing six foot three. Our first meeting was extremely informal. Every morning at nine, he would step out of his office, seat himself at the city editor’s desk, and scan the first edition of the paper, page by page.
No mistake ever eluded him. And each mistake he found set off a bellow of profanity that would have blistered the mouth of a Civil War mule driver. On this particular day he spotted a mistake in the sports section and blasted out: “Hey you blankety-blank-blank in sports! Change that blankcty-blank-blank caption on page forty. How blankety stupid can you blank-blank guys be?” Inasmuch as I was the only member of the sports staff on duty at the moment, I caught the full effects of the Ruppel temper.
A short time later, we met more formally. I was still writing sports. We were seated next to each other, ringside, at the Chicago Stadium, waiting for Heavyweight Champion Joe Louis to flatten another of his “bum of the month” contenders. A politician whom I knew well was Ruppel’s guest. He introduced us.
Ruppel didn’t recognize me.
“You with the Times?” he asked.
I assured him that I was. In sports.
“Who’d you know? How’d you get the job?”
I replied that I didn’t “know” anybody, that I had applied and thought that I had been hired on my ability.
He fixed a quizzical eye on me for a few seconds. Then, in his usual lusty manner, he gave me a hearty slap on the back and exclaimed, “Glad to have you aboard, kid.”
Any further attempt at conversation was impossible. Joe Louis landed a right and the fight, less than two rounds old, was over.
Years later, when I wrote Ruppel’s obituary, I said: “Working under him was like working under a time bomb that could go off at any moment.” But despite all his bluster and bluff, Ruppel had an appealing personality, an uncanny sense of news, a keen ability to appraise photographs – and a stubbornness that never allowed anyone to challenge his authority. It was this last characteristic that cost Ruppel some of the best newspaper jobs in the nation.
A classic example of mulishness occurred while Ruppel was editor of what is now Chicago’s American, a job he held after serving as a Marine in World War II. He was a rare Hearst editor. He was audacious enough to declare that he, not William Randolph Hearst, would decide which of “The Chief’s” editorials would run in Chicago. Once, when Ruppel was asked the whereabouts of one of Hearst’s “sacred cow” editorials on antivivisection, Ruppel pointed to the wastebasket.
“It’s in there,” he shouted. “And that’s where the goddam thing is staying.”
As might be expected, Ruppel’s connection with the Hearst organization was severed shortly after.
(It is interesting to note that the Chicago’s American has enjoyed much more editorial freedom since it has been sold to the McCormick interests. Most observers expected the Tribune management to enforce its own rigid policies on the new acquisition.