Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin/March 12, 1945

You and your people seem to think your troubles should come first with us, but let me tell you something.

The party is over and France is off the cuff and the best thing you can do for yourselves is pull down that trained thumb of yours and quit standing by the road always waiting for a hitch.

We have an awful lot of our own people, maybe more than a million, living in trailers on parking lots, and I wouldn’t even try to guess how many others living in shacks and barracks who are likely to kick up a row if we don’t pull up our socks and somehow slap together some fairly habitable houses when this war is over.

It is so confused that we don’t exactly know ourselves where they all came from or how far from their old homes they find themselves today and you might say that a lot of them haven’t had their stakes down for years and can’t really call any place home except just where they happen to be.

Living in a trailer is like being a turtle. You tote your home along with you and when it began people thought it was kind of cute, but that was just for a short vacation and it is a very different thing for steady. Even two people in one of those things get into each other’s way and on each other’s nerves, but when there is a child or two it is just awful. You know, no privacy, no sitting room, no bathroom, no room.

To hear you people, a fellow would think we didn’t have a care in the world. You would think that if a fellow just had the money in this country he could walk in and buy whatever he wants for himself.

Why, nowadays, you walk into a store and you see rows of empty shelves and all they can give you mostly is the nopes. Any cigarettes? Nope.

Sugar? Nope.

Can you sell me a baseball for my kid? Nope.

Steak? Nope. Bacon? Nope. Chewing gum? Nope. Babies’ under? Nope. Black pepper? Nope. Sheets? Well maybe next week.

That wonderful standard of living that we used to boast so much about is way down around the Bulgarian level, if you ask me, and those cars that the American workman used to rattle around in so regardlessly, with a new one every year or two, are now anywhere from three to 10 or 12 years old and most of them are five years on the road. And the gas is closely rationed and lots of times even if you have the coupons and the money the guy just gives you the same old nope because he can’t get any himself.

You people better make your plans to get to work and take care of your own needs and not count on us for much. The way it looks around here we will have a market for all those millions of cars and washing machines and refrigerators within our own borders for years and years and a lot of our cities are going to need rebuilding almost as badly as some of those that were bombed in Europe and then there will have to be new roads and railroad equipment and we are not going to stay on rationing and the nopes indefinitely just to feed France. Our people come first and frankly yours haven’t exactly overwhelmed us with gratitude for past favors.

Would you care to discuss trading Martinique to us to get that burr out from beneath our shirt so that if France should go Bolshevik we wouldn’t have to keep covered with warships and planes, as we did after 1940? Well, then maybe the U. S. A will have to do as Russia did about protecting her western frontier and, judging by 1940 that wouldn’t be too hard. Anyway, general, haul down that thumb because we have an awful lot to do for ourselves before we even pull up level with our normal standard of life.

Yours truly,

George Spelvin, American.

Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin/March 14, 1945

Contrary to the tenor of many shrill cries of alarm, there is nothing new or unconventional in the demand of John L. Lewis for a royalty of ten cents a ton or $60,000,000 a year, payable, not to the individual coal miners but to the treasury of their totalitarian union. Neither was the idea original with Jimmy Petrillo when, recently, in rowdy contempt for the War Labor Board (WLB) and President Roosevelt, he insisted on a sales tax on recorded music which he expects to yield about $4,000,000 a year, not to the musicians, but to his treasury.

The precedent exists far back in union practice, notably in the needle trades whose rulers are staunch New Dealers, and in certain local butchers’ unions which sell tags to be affixed to chickens killed under union conditions.

The basic principle of the case, the right of unions to collect sales taxes on commodities payable, in the long run, by the consumer, has long been established, probably without the knowledge of the people. Whether this tax accrues to the individual who does the work, is shared by all members of a union or flows into a fund inaccessible to them, is a secondary matter, loaded however with its own fascinating portents.

These rights, or assumptions, existed in a small way and in desultory and imperceptible practice before the New Deal. Since the New Deal began, however, they have been confirmed by recognition.

Mr. Lewis’ demand is in the public interest because it presents in shocking enormity the power of private organizations, subject to no income taxes and exempt even from the obligation to file reports of their income, to tax all the people, each in its own interest. Now the people have no excuse to remain unaware and if they continue to submit, they have only themselves to blame. Possibly they want it that way.

Mr. Petrillo expects to reap $4,000,000 a year to start, but hopes, by extending his sales tax to movie admissions, to run it up to $6,000,000 a year, at least. He says it is his intention to hold the money until the fund reaches $100,000,000 and then begin unemployment payments to musicians thrown out of work by the mechanization and repetition of music.

Assuming that this would take 15 years, many of the distressed musicians will be dead before their unemployment benefits are released and granting Mr. Petrillo’s argument that most of them will be thrown out of jobs very soon, it follows that most of them will take up other work and drop out of Jimmy’s union.

Thus, by the time the $100,000,000 is ready for distribution, the membership might be down to no more than, say, 25,000, a possibility that surely has not eluded men so shrewd and far-sighted as Mr. Petrillo and his counsel, Joe Padway, honored friends, both, and devoted followers of Mr. Roosevelt.

Or, under his constitution and with the advice and counsel of Mr. Padway, he could expel all the surviving members and cut up the money with Mr. Padway and any others toward whom he might feel generous. His constitution permits him to do this and no law forbids him.

At any rate, Mr. Petrillo’s mere “intention” to use the money for unemployment benefits or cultural works in the sweet bye and bye is not legal and binding. It is just a momentary idea, subject to change at his own discretion, under the close and curious structure of his union. So is the “intention” of John L. Lewis to use his sales tax of $60,000,000 a year for “modern medical and surgical service, hospitalization, insurance, rehabilitation and economic protection.” Mr. Lewis is strong and willful and a consummate politician as Franklin D. Roosevelt has learned in the touchy fingering of many bruises suffered in contests with one man who delights to draw him into fights and has licked him every time save 1940 when Mr. Lewis supported Wendell Willkie.

But there is no excuse for indignation against Mr. Lewis. He is only exercising a privilege of unions confirmed by the Roosevelt government and doggedly defended by Roosevelt henchmen in the Senate.

So if Mr. Lewis collects, say, $200,000,000 in the next four years and spends it all in the next election that is, after all, not his doing, but Mr. Roosevelt’s. He could do this on the precedent of Mr. Roosevelt’s own P. A. C., as an “educational” project for the attainment of his stated purpose to “provide for the economic protection” of the miners.

Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin/March 9, 1945

In the light of Judge Phillip L. Sullivan’s decision that the seizure of Montgomery Ward’s property was a lawless act, let us refer to a gratuitous statement by Frank P. Graham, ostensibly a “public” or impartial member of the War Labor Board (WLB), on Dec. 17.

The very designation “public” member reveals a serious fault in the spirit of government these days, for all government officials should be “public” officials. That is to say they should be impartial and just. Yet we have labor senators and congressmen and Mr. Biddle, the attorney general, has announced, in effect, that the Roosevelt Government is a “labor” government. That means that the Roosevelt Government is partial to unions which are subordinate groups of his political party and in just that degree, is unfair to the rest of the nation.

To be sure that is democracy majority rule, but it is not equal justice under law.

Mr. Graham denounced Montgomery Ward, a private citizen, so to speak, and taxpayer, for “blasting at the foundations of maximum production” and spoke of the “no strike” agreement of “patriotic labor.”

An impartial member of this board, if he felt called on to make any statement at all, might have felt that fairness required him to recall that the “no strike” agreement of “patriotic labor” had been violated by thousands of strikes, which had blasted “at the foundations of production” in works vitally essential to the war. On the other hand, Ward’s actual connection with such production is slight, if not wholly imaginary.

James Byrnes, the director of war mobilization, also attacked Ward’s in an affidavit and the army moved in by order of President Roosevelt, executed by the secretary of war.

The army seized the company’s private property, including its receipts, and made disbursements, including wages, according to the decisions of the War Labor Board. It has just as much right to take the money out of your pockets.

By now we have the President, the War Labor Board, the director of war mobilization and the army itself all arrayed against a citizen defending his rights. He may not be a popular citizen but neither was Captain Dreyfuss.

The army, of course, is not “public” in the sense of impartiality. The President is commander-in-chief and all the officers are obliged to obey his orders and uphold him in his contentions. An officer might have some vague and theoretical legal right to publicly criticize an order given to him by authority of his commander-in-chief, but this simply is not done.

Examining the situation now, we find the army enforcing an illegal order to uphold a “policy” of a government which is admittedly partial to Ward’s opponent in a case at law. The army, too, has propaganda services whose duty is to justify the army’s position which in this case violates a citizen’s rights. The army is, in practical effect, the client of its own propaganda specialists and obviously will suffer no criticism at their hands.

All this puts the army in a false position and imposes on its propaganda services the duty of defending indefensible acts.

Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin/March 16, 1945

A few years ago Henry Wallace declared that the people had made a mistake in a congressional election which went against his party and since then the Political Action Committee has agreed that they were in error on that occasion. In fact, one stated purpose of the P. A. C. was to educate the citizens against repetition of the lapse in which they returned a batch of Republicans.

I am forced to agree with them that the people can be wrong but I am almost sure they will disagree with me when I say the people were wrong last fall in electing Mr. Roosevelt to a fourth term.

Still, I think it would have been wiser to elect Tom Dewey because I believe that in that case the President of our great republic would not have gone to Yalta but would have made Premier Stalin come at least halfway for once, which would have been important to our national prestige and a gain for Christian morality in the world.

You may argue that this is a small point and the discussion of it mere quibbling but my idea is that the peoples of the world who looked to us for leadership have now turned their eyes and thoughts to Moscow because Premier Stalin always makes Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill go to him. That is bad for morality in the world at large because, after all, the world knows that Premier Stalin is just about as bad as Hitler and we deceive ourselves if we refuse to give it a thought.

Once they said Premier Stalin was too busy chasing Germans to go farther than Tehran. Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill had a few little concerns of their own at the time but off they went, nevertheless, to meet Premier Stalin. The inconvenience to Mr. Roosevelt must have been awful, much as he loves travel and much as he seems to enjoy the ostentation of such bull-sessions in the old world.

I think an awful lot of good people in many countries who hate and fear Communism would have taken hope if the people of the United States had elected Mr. Dewey. Naturally, he would have cooperated with Premier Stalin in the fighting war and, in the face of an inherited situation, he could not have refused to discuss and plan peace.

On two points, in my judgment, Mr. Dewey has been wrong. I think he yielded to a condition when he said, in Portland, Ore., that the Wagner Act was a good law. As a lawyer, he knows it is lopsided because it makes the employer the defendant in a government court which is not only the judge but the plaintiff, prosecutor and court of appeals.

Possibly he intended, once elected, to educate the people to the evil of this law, acquaint them with its European character and revise it, step by step. The other fault that I find with his political wisdom is his endorsement, since his defeat, of the New York anti-discrimination bill.

Mr. Dewey never has shown the slightest racial or religious prejudice. As district attorney and as governor, he has been either utterly unfeeling or studiously correct in his appointments of Jews and Negroes, the two minorities to whose favor the anti-discrimination bill was directed. But he had been so placed by propaganda that, had he opposed the proposal, the other side would have called him a Jew-baiter and Jim Crow Republican. Not only he but his party would have suffered unfairly.

I insist that Mr. Dewey is a better man than Mr. Roosevelt on every count and would have continued the war just as successfully as Mr. Roosevelt has, a point of doubt in the hearts of many voters last fall which may have been the deciding factor. He takes government seriously. not flippantly.

He governs by law, not by fear and by prejudice. He is against special privilege not only for the other side but from his side and for himself and his family. And his moral courage is such that if he had been elected he would not have been afraid to discard the devious and dubious term “democracy” and substitute “Christianity” or “Christian ideals” from time to time.

Finally, I believe Mr. Dewey would have established Washington. D. C., and not Moscow, U. S. S. R., as the moral and political capital of the world.

Damon Runyon

Johnson City Staff-News/August 12, 1927

This foul business is really becoming fashionable

We have foul balls, foul play, foul punches, and a foul language, a lot of which was spilled around the Yankee Stadium tonight when Senor Paolina Uzcudun, the pudgy wood chopper of Spain, was disqualified by Referee James Crowley for the alleged fouling of M. Viola Chap-Delain, commonly known as Jack Delaney.

It came about after a minute and fifty seconds, of what they were passing off on the 30,000 clients for fighting, in the seventh round.

The pugilistic pride of sunny Spain was pushing into Movila like a snow plow, throwing punches ahead of him in a sort of haphazard manner at Delaney’s body.

They seemed to be landing in the territory that was fair enough and the dignified looking French Canadian was offering no complaint.

The referee commenced warning Paolino, and admonishing him to “keep ’em up,” to which the Spaniard replied with a blank stare.

I here rise to remark that when Paolino offers a blank stare, it is pretty blank, at that.

He continued plowing, when suddenly Crowley stepped between the boys, and motioned the Spaniard to his corner, from which immediately arose loud Carrambas, the like of that. The same words were spoken in English by many of the ringworms present. They sound much different from Spanish.

Paolino gave the referee another blank stare, and finally wandered to his corner, where he sat down looking very blank indeed. Delaney seemed somewhat startled by Crowley’s action, but he is a nimble-witted young gent, and he turned and trotted to his own corner.

His manager, Pete Riley, presently emerged from the corner and passed about the ring above the dazed inmates of the press section exhibiting an aluminum pot, or pan, one of those protectors won by boxers when engaged in their professional labors. I believe the technical name is a “cup.” The “cup” exhibited by Mr. Riley seemed to be dented, as if it had been sat on by Mr. Fatty Arbuckle, or someone of like avoirdupois. I am informed that these dents are commonly accepted as prima facie evidence of a foul blow.

Later Mr. Rilley hoisted the aluminum vessel high above his head that the whole world might see, and for the rest of the evening the foul was forgotten by gents present as they tried to explain to their fair neighbors what it was all about.

As far as I am personally concerned, I could find no fault, but then these fouls are getting me all confused, anyway. Someone is always being fouled in this man’s town, either in the ring, or out of it. I viewed the punches that Mr. Crowley said was foul, but Mr. Rickard has his press seats so constructed for this event that most of the inmates were peering up slope at the proceedings, and thus their vision was a trifle cockeyed.

I will say, however, that if M. Olvia was fouled I must revamp my diagnosis of the Dempsey-Sharkey matter, and hereby, declare the terrible Sharkey to have been fouled a foot to a foot and a half. My first impression when Mr. Crowley stopped the proceedings was that he had taken pity on the clients and was doing away with the matter as a humane act.

I was thinking well of Mr. Crowley as a kindly man, when the news of the fouling came out, for you see the thing had been pretty terrible.

For six rounds the woodchopper couldn’t have hit M. Ovilia with a handful of rice. However, Paolino kept himself totally surrounded by Elbows, and while M. Ovilia played the march of the wooden soldiers on his bean, the delegates from the Basque didn’t seem more than just slightly annoyed.

Damon Runyon

The Monroe News/January 29, 1927

Mr. Joe Schenck, the big movie man, pays Mr. Leo Deigel, the golf expert, $1000 per month for instruction in the manly art of pasture pool, so I am informed by one of my most trusted west coast operatives.

Of course $1000 a month is not a button off Mr. Schenck’s expansive financial test, but it is a fair salary for a teacher, at that. They say Mr. Deigel is to receive a bonus of $5000 when Mr. Schenck attains such proficiency under his instruction that he can waddle the old pill from hole to hole with less than a hundred strokes.

I am glad that I am not the party of the first part to such a contract. I mean to say I am glad that I have not promised Mr. Deigel such bonus under such conditions. I am at best weak to human temptation. Can you imagine me with a score of 98 and one cinch shot to go to break that 100, at a cost of $5000?

I fear I would be unable to resist the impulse to flub, or dub, or scrub, or snub, or slub that one. (What is it they do when they blow a shot, anyway?) Still, knowing Mr. Joe Schenck I am sure that he would pay over the $5000 with vast pleasure. He is that way.

This golf bug seems to be a terrible affliction. I can remember when Mr. Joe Bannon, the world’s champion newspaper circulation manager, would sit down calmly with you and discuss this and that without heat.

Now he comes in with an outdoor complexion, and a healthy aspect which is positively odious to indoor athletes and speaks of golf and golf, and more golf. He does it in the winter time, too, which I hold is carrying matters a little too far.

But while the golf bug is very, very bad, I have come upon another malady among the citizens of the great city of New York that is even worse. It is hockey. Professional hockey, at that. The boys are becoming violent on the subject.

“What’d you think of that game?” they demand now-o-nights.

If you answer that you didn’t see it, they glare at you with indignation. The idea of anyone not seeing that game seems to annoy them.

I have not heard of any hockey fan employing a hockey expert to teach him the game, but I would not be surprised at any time to learn that Colonel J. S. Hammond, president of the New York Rangers, is paying some star $1000 per month for that purpose. The thing has gone pretty far with Colonel Hammond.

At frequent intervals of late I have come upon my old friend Mr. Weelum J. McBeth, the sports writer, seated at tables in the Roaring Forties with mysterious looking strangers.

I can identify none of them as of the turf or baseball world wherein Mr. McBeth moved with vast authority for years, and the disquieting thought occurs to me that they are hockeyists. I fear that Mr. McBeth has suffered a reversion to type.

Mr. McBeth is a Canadian by birth, and long before hockey came to New York in its present professional form I used to hear him talking of the pastime of his youth without understanding what he meant. I thought it some childish diversion that had left its imprint on his memory, just as I occasionally revert in fancy to exciting miggle games of my adolescence.

But I can see now that Mr. McBeth would naturally be one of the first to be seriously affected by the new mania that has beset the citizens of the large city. He was practically a push over for it from the very start. Now he associates on terms of understanding with those who commit hockey, to say nothing of cheering for them from the stands.

I never really appreciated the extent to which professional hockey has grown in New York until the boys commenced to ask for Annie Oakleys, or passes. You cannot give away Annie Oakleys to sports in which there is no popular interest in New York. I even hear that the lads are wagering on the result of the games, which argues that we may need a commission of some kind.

There are two professional hockey teams in New York, the Americans and the Rangers, and local excitement seems to be equally divided between them. They both play in Madison Square Garden, and the important games pull packed houses.

They draw heavily from the Roaring Forties, from the actors, cafe people, and sporting contingent generally, which is all the more surprising to me. It takes something with plenty of thrill in it to interest this rather blase class.

And the customers talk hockey with understanding—the plays and the players. You hear red hot arguments about the games. Gentlemen have even been known to square away at each other. When someone remarked three years ago that professional hockey would be a wow in little old New York, I thought they were foolish.

Now I can see that it is the big winter game of the city, and the next time I see Mr. McBeth and his mysterious looking friends seated together I think I shall have to move in on them and join the argument.

Damon Runyon

Intelligencer Journal/October 15, 1927

I have received many complaints of late because of the protracted silence of my well-known west coast operative, T-69 otherwise Mr. Hap O’Connor. Some of my readers have been wondering if something had happened to Mr. O’Connor, but a report about two feet long has just reached me from him, and it seems that he was merely slightly incapacitated for a time.

It seems that Mr. O’Connor wounded his typewriter finger opening a bottle. Mr. O’Connor preserves the one-touch method. This is no underhanded crack. Mr. O’Connor sustained his wound on board a Spanish ship in the harbor of Los Angeles. It seems that there are a lot of foreign vessels out there just now, and Mr. O’Connor, who is known as America’s Guest, called around among them.

“Yesterday I was in France, Italy, Spain and Germany,” writes Mr. O’Connor. “The day before I visited Sweden, England, Japan and South America. They sure treated me fine on these boats. The crew all talk to me in their own language, and I just shake my head yes, because I found out they are generally asking if I wish refreshments, which of course I do. It comes natural to me.

“My hands are calloused from handling glass on these boats. The Germans don’t drink cold beer and never have it cold for us visitors, so we have to bring our own ice. It is very inconvenient. Well, I suppose you want a report on the athletic activities of the Pacific Battle Fleet.”

Sailors at Football

I gather from Mr. O’Connor’s report that the Battle Fleet has opened its 1927 football season. It seems that they have just opened a new navy stadium at Point Firmin, San Pedro, which is Los Angeles Harbor, and Mr. O’Connor says that 15,000 bluejackets, marines and civilians saw two games free of charge.

“I guess this is the only place in the world where a fellow can spend Saturday afternoons in the Los Angeles harbor district without laying anything on the line,” says Mr. O’Connor.

“I would rather stay here and witness one of those bluejacket gridiron contests that take in one of them Dempsey-Tunney fights. As far as fights are concerned you can see plenty of that in one of these sailors football games.

“The sailors take to this pigskin game like they do when they are in the battle turrets aboardship firing them 14- and 16-inch salvos.

“I sat in the stands on the sunny side between two old navy war horses, Lieutenant Jack Kennedy and Lieutenant John Sharpe.

“Both of these old-timers sat puffing their old pipes watching the battleships California and Arizona do their stuff on one field and the battleships Mississippi and Colorado on the other.

Two Old-Timers Talk

“Kennedy and Sharpe got to talking about their old billet, the Great Lakes Training Station at Chicago, in which I guess they had about 30,000 men to look after in athletics.

“Kennedy and Sharpe tell me that during the World War, they refereed more than one thousand fights between the rookie sailors.

“And since the war, ten years ago, Kennedy has officiated in around a thousand more fights. Sharpe has retired from officiating in fights, but Kennedy is still very much in the ring and can be seen every now and then at the local fight stadium on the Pacific Coast.

“In today’s football game there were two players that, counting this season, are on their seventeenth year straight of navy football.

“They are Matty Gillis, right guard, of the battleship Mississippi, and Johnny Struckus, the flagship California’s fullback and captain.

“Both played an outstanding game in all four periods of the contest, both being responsible for their ships being on the long end of the score.

“Another old-timer who right now is the greatest open field runner in the west coast navy is Leo Fielding, the battleship Idaho’s big Indian fullback. Fielding is playing his twentieth year of navy football and is the most feared back in navy football circles.

Up-to-Date Stuff

“Jack Kennedy and John Sharpe said today that this sure is an up-to-date navy now. With hot and cold showers and nice green grass to play on, and all kinds of padding on your straight jacket.

“Jack says a fellow has to be a Houdini to get into one of these football suits nowadays, Kennedy and Sharpe said when they played football it was in brickyards, etc., and after one of them old-time navy football games a fellow was lucky to get out of bed the next Friday before the game.

“Football now is the navy’s major sport, pulling races next. I guess more money changes hands on a boat race than on a football game. But football in the navy seems to draw the biggest sailor crowd and hold ’em all afternoon.

“The west coast navy’s major football league consists of the following battleships: California, Colorado, Maryland, West Virginia, Tennessee, New Mexico, Mississippi, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada.

“Then there is the Train Force or Fleet Base Force consisting of the hospital ship Relief, Procony, Medusa, and other smaller war craft.

“Then we have the Submarine divisions and the Naval Air Force teams and the Destroyer force elevens at San Diego.

“The winners of the battleship divisions play the San Diego naval district champions and then the fleet base force comes in. And the team that beats all of these is declared the Pacific fleet football champions.”

Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin/March 8, 1945

NEW YORK, March 8. General de Gaulle’s petulant rudeness and the demanding attitude of his France toward the United States will be all for the best if they cure us, finally, of the juvenile crush which has controlled our relations with this irresponsible people. In that case, we would see France and the French very much as their continental neighbors and many of the British saw them, not through the calf eyes of a rich, young, extravagant and geographically distant nation which regarded even her village manure-piles as fetchingly quaint and the innate larceny of her merchants as a somehow lovable foible.

The plain fact of the matter is that France quit cold in this war and later was rescued by the Americans, the second time in a quarter of a century that her life was saved by the United States. Her conduct in the brief fighting war in 1940 was not comparable to that of the Russians when their homeland was attacked a year later nor to the tenacity of the Germans in recent weeks. Reporters who covered the rout wrote that French Army units were intimidated by the mere noise of the Stukas and that the soldier of 1940 was no worthy son of the father who died in Verdun in 1916.

During the interval between the wars, sometimes called the long armistice, the attitude of France toward the United States was that of a spoiled and perfumed sweetheart toward an infatuated and too generous suitor. The French nation was a feminine concept in our psychology, pretty, vivacious, erratic, unreasonable, but, altogether, desirable. French politicians, stout, practical and shrewd, realized all this and laughed at our gullibility for they knew themselves and their own people.

It must have amazed them that they could get so much propaganda and the material benefits of this unreasoning goodwill from a few hundred or thousand medals of their Legion of Honor which entitled essentially undistinguished Americans to a little red ribbon or rosette in their lapels. Meanwhile, Americans wore hooted in Paris for being Americans whose country now and again would send in a bill for a little payment on the debt of World War I.

The history of France is not that of a peace-loving, unaggressive nation, although, for that matter, none of the great powers got that way through fair and gentle methods, and the extension of France up to the Rhine after this war will be a repetition, in reverse, of Alsace-Lorraine, with consequences which some future generation will have the privilege or misfortune to observe. Lost provinces always pine for rescue as every Frenchman knows and inevitably knights go warring to release them.

There is no reason to dislike France or the French but neither is there any excuse to maintain the fictitious concept that has embarrassed us in our thoughts and dealings all this time. They have their excellent virtues which we may appreciate without that sophomoric rapture in the contemplation of a toothsome co-ed which has distorted our relations.

It seems a little too much to ask that in the midst of a war in which Americans landed in the face of German fortifications on the French coast, chased the Nazis out of Paris and, finally, are smashing into Germany, the rescue party should also give and deliver to France rolling stock to replenish her railroads, feed and clothe her and rearm the army which, in 1940, gave up its weapons without a creditable fight.

Westbrook Pegler

Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, NY)/March 7, 1945

NEW YORK, March 7. No fair American newspaper hand would insist that Britain’s imitation of our journalistic methods and ideas has been altogether salutary. It is a fact that in the efforts of London’s popular press, as distinguished from the more stately blanket sheets, to jazz up news and features, British journalism produced some grotesque effects. They developed something which their conservatives called “the stunt press” and it was pretty awful.

Nevertheless, they did learn to put the punch in the lead and to publish the news quickly, instead of next week. They also adopted our professional rue against killing off a story by backing into it with some such introduction as “Last Wednesday, at the Shrewsbury Assizes.”

In the course of the education of the British there came to New York and Washington one of the friendliest and most entertaining individuals who ever delighted our craft. His name was David Blumenfeld, the son of an American and a West Pointer, at that, who had gone to England a long time ago and had become, as editor of the London Express, a noted exponent of both American hustle and directness and British restraint or dignity.

Dave had been a soldier in His Majesty’s forces in World War I, leaving the service with the rank of major, and by an arrangement with influential friends in New York, the young man was shipped out to America to learn our ways.

After a time they sent Dave down to Washington to learn our ways. There he wrote a historic lead on a story of vast importance for which he is as well remembered by those few who had the privilege to read it as Frank Ward O’Malley will ever be for his interview with the mother of the murdered policeman.

The United Press kept only a casual watch on Sunday nights in Washington in those days and Dave was sitting on the lid. The telegraph operator across the desk was the only other man on duty. Dave was beating out a long letter to his pater in London when the telephone rang.

Someone told him that Senator Boise Penrose had died suddenly.

“How unfortunate,” Mr. Blumenfeld exclaimed with just the proper degree of sympathy. “I’m dreadfully sorry. I am told he was a capital chap.”

He resumed his letter to his father.

After some time, an excited query came down over the wire from New York. The International News and Associated Press were out with the story.

“Opposition says Penrose dead.”

Dave scanned the message and resumed his letter to his dad.

Some telegraph operators are reluctant to cross the desk. They stay on their side and mind their own business and let the news people attend to theirs. This fellow was friendly however, and knew Dave’s ignorance of some of our abnormalities in the handling of news. A few minutes later he asked tactfully, “Dave, did you see that message from NX (New York)?”

“Yes, yes,” Dave said. “I am afraid it is only too true. Chap rang me up half an hour ago to tell me about it. A great pity. Awfully painful to the family, I dare say.”

“But, Dave, they want a story from you about it. Hadn’t ‘you better phone his hotel and check and then do a piece?”

“Of course, splendid,” Mr. Blumenfeld said. “Topping idea. Thanks for reminding me.”

So Dave telephoned the hotel and said he would like to speak to Senator Penrose. He was told that this was impossible. The senator had died within the hour. Over the phone he heard the music of an orchestra in the lobby.

Our student now spat on his hands and prepared to turn out something for posterity.

I will let you decide whether he did, for, after a long and mighty struggle, this was the lead, American style, that he tossed across the desk to the operator:

“Washington, D. C, Jan. 23 From where he lay, had he been able, he might have heard, were he alive, the strains of lovely music from the orchestra in the lobby of his hotel. But Senator Boise Penrose, alas, had expired some five-and-twenty minutes before.”

Dave gave up journalism and returned to England, where his talents, in a few years, earned him a salary that was fabulous to working newspapermen. He became editor of the menu of the Lyons Coiree Houses, the London equivalent of our one-arm luncheries, composing each week an essay on vitamins, calories, travel, and the origin of the term “porterhouse” as applied to steak.

Westbrook Pegler

Oregon Daily Journal/December 31, 1921

NEW YORK. Dec 31. Those famous friendly enemies, Johnny Dundee, who comes not from Scotland, and Willie Jackson, chauffeur of the largest nose in pugilism, went through the eleventh “how de do” at Madison Square Garden Friday night, 15 rounds to another draw decision.

Jackson had Dundee drinking stiff libations of right-hand punches in the last round, causing Johnny to wobble for the boys in a realistic imitation of New Year’s Eve.

Dundee came through with the long experience with Jackson, however, covering up securely to stay the round.

Jackson weighed 134-1/2 and Dundee 128-1/4.

Dundee said he broke his starboard paddle in the second round, which may be true, as he did little work with it.

Kid Norfolk, holder of the Rickard belt, symbolic of the negro heavyweight championship, outpointed the Jamaica Kid, another pork-chop addict in the eighth round semi-final. It wasn’t much of a fight.