Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [53]
And, even more like The Front Page, there was the courtroom correspondent for one paper who, until quite recently, was operating a bookie joint on the side, for the convenience of the clerks and bailiffs. And, of course, some of the slickest amateur poker in the world is still played in Chicago’s City, County, and Federal Building pressrooms.
Probably the best known of the handful of working newspapermen who actually date back to the “good old days” is a reporter from my own paper, Ray Brennan. Widely acclaimed as America’s top crime reporter, Ray has won so many honors over the years that everyone stopped counting years ago. He holds a Heywood Broun Award, five Chicago Newspaper Guild Sticks o’ Type, a Mystery Writers of America citation, and the Joe Fay Memorial Award, which was established by the Sun-Times editorial staff in honor of our late, beloved assistant city editor.
Ray made his first nation-wide scoop in 1933, when he broke the story of the escape of John Dillinger from the jail in Crown Point, Indiana. He just happened to phone the jail at the right time – but he had the perspicacity to keep the line tied up with small talk until his scoop was safe. He has since been the first to disclose major developments in such famous trials as those of Dr. Sam Sheppard, Mickey Jelke, and the Greenlease kidnapers.
He filed the first story on the death of Al Capone. (To get that story, he masqueraded as an oxygen technician to gain admission to Capone’s heavily guarded house in Miami Beach.)
He set out to interview Fidel Castro during the Cuban Revolution. Before he got his story, he was nearly killed in a riot in Havana; he was jailed and threatened with death in Santiago; he was thrown from a mule, and contracted dysentery and lost twenty-eight pounds – but, in the end, he got an exclusive series, which he later expanded into a book, Cuba, Castro, and Justice.
Daring as these adventures are, however, Ray will probably go down in journalistic history for a reportorial exploit he pulled off in 1950. A few days before the senatorial and county elections that year, the Kefauver Crime Committee, meeting in closed session, had questioned Dan Gilbert, Democratic candidate for Sheriff of Cook County – a man who had been nicknamed the “world’s richest cop.” At the end of the session Gilbert’s testimony was unaccountably suppressed.
Brennan smelled a rat. He flew down to Washington, called the stenographic service which was supposed to be typing up the transcripts, and duped a receptionist into sending him an unedited copy. And then he flew back and plastered the whole ugly story over twenty-five columns of the Sun-Times. This scoop not only resulted in Gilbert’s immediate defeat (by 270,000 votes) – it changed the entire course of national affairs. In the backlash of the scandal, Illinois Senator Scott W. Lucas, the popular Democratic Majority Leader, was also defeated, and the Republican candidate, former United States Representative Everett M. Dirksen (now the Senate Minority Leader) was swept into office.
For a time the Justice Department threatened to try Brennan on the charge of impersonating a Federal employee. But ultimately the case was dropped.
Ben Hecht and some of the other old-timers have been inclined to disparage our modern newspapers. But a former reporting crony of Hecht’s, publicist Julius Klein, is only one of the many people who differ on this point – completely.
According to Klein, “Chicago’s newspapers today are doing a better job, with better newspapermen, under much more difficult conditions, than ever before.”
There may be fewer poets and novelists in the modern city room, but there are more professional reporters and editors. There is little of the irresponsible sensationalism of Hecht’s day. You will find better-balanced coverage of national and