Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [47]
With his razor-sharp intelligence, Ruppel was a masterful headline writer. One headline which created journalistic history was written by Ruppel in 1936, when President Roosevelt was seeking his second term. The Tribune, whose Colonel McCormick detested FDR, was running a “box” daily on its front page, in which the days remaining until election were counted off, one by one. These boxes were headed “ONLY – DAYS LEFT TO SAVE YOUR COUNTRY.”
The campaign was the prime topic of conversation throughout Chicago. Ruppel was aware of this, and he was also aware that the Tribune “box” was a perfect target for a page-one gag headline on Election Day. But what should it say? For three days he racked his brain for just the right headline. It finally occurred to him during dinner on Election Eve, in the now defunct Chez Paree. His companions were Ray Hahne, production manager of the Times, and Mike Fish, then chief photographer of the Times and now a thriving Chicago restaurateur.
Ruppel had been pounding the table and tossing out headline after headline. “I know what I want but I can’t put my finger on it,” he said. Hahne finally exclaimed, “Aw, let’s forget the whole thing and go home. We can’t stay here until Christmas. That’s about fifty days away, you know.”
“That’s it!” shouted Ruppel.
The next day, when the big story was the fact that the nation was going to the polls to elect either Roosevelt or Landon as President, Ruppel’s headline ignored the obvious and struck out at the Tribune’s campaign “to save the country.” His headline read:
52 DAYS
TO XMAS
The influence of such colorful figures will not soon diminish. But imaginative journalism is only part of the tradition that Chicago has inherited from those early years. The distinction of having nurtured the most extraordinary renaissance in modern literature is another. Not even New York, the present literary capital of the United States, has spawned so many giants in the field of letters in so short a period as did Chicago in the first quarter of this century.
There was Sherwood Anderson, the former Ohio paint factory executive, working in a Chicago advertising agency by day and writing the novel, Winesburg, Ohio, by night.
There was Hoosier Theodore Dreiser, who drew on his memories of Chicago reporting days when he used traction magnate Charles Yerkes as the model for Frank Cowperwood, the hero of his novels, The Financier and The Titan.
There were Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, and poets Vachel Lindsay, Lew Sarett, and Edgar Lee Masters – a law partner of Clarence Darrow. And James Gould Cozzens, Edna Ferber, John Dos Passos, and Archibald MacLeish.
And there is the author of the most-quoted description of Chicago ever written:
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders . . .
Carl Sandburg was a man who had already been around when he wrote those awe-struck words. A native of downstate Galesburg, he had played semipro baseball, worked on Mississippi River steamboats, soldiered in the Spanish-American War, washed dishes in Kansas City, picked fruit in Colorado, covered a police beat in New York City, served as secretary to Milwaukee’s Socialist Mayor – and had even spent two weeks at West Point in the same class with General Douglas MacArthur (where fortunately for American letters, Sandburg had been washed out). But Chicago stirred him as nothing had before.
Chicago was first to honor him for his poems. Poetry, the magazine founded here by Chicagoan Harriet Monroe, bought “Chicago,” “Fog,” and many other famous early poems. It was also here that he learned writing discipline, while pounding out spot news and feature beats