"Such Interesting People"....reviewed by Bob Sanders

 

I seem to have come full circle public transportation-wise during these latter years.  I began early on in Lakewood, Ohio where I moved about as a youngster--first on the Detroit Avenue trolley, then the more upscale Clifton Boulevard ride.  The destination was nearly always downtown Cleveland and the movie houses featuring live entertainment including swing era bands such as Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Count Basie.  I just remembered not to leave out Jimmie Lunceford.

Now, I'm retired living in Bellingham, Washington and using a free WTA pass available to those who have lasted at least 80 years.  WTA stands for Whatcom Transit Authority and I ride the #15 bus from the Cordata Station three times a week.  It's transportation that takes me within two blocks of a swim at the YMCA.  It's a 25-minute run each way and I manage to read round-trip except when kids with little to say somehow produce boisterous enthusiasms about such things as video games.  It's times like that that I realize how fortunate I've been to have lived most of my life during less techy crazed times.

When I became a working stiff, I still managed to use public transportation--first in Cleveland, then in St. Louis where I went to work for TV Guide in 1954.  Actually, I did St. Louis gigs twice eventually prompting a Canadian friend to observe: "Guess you couldn't get enough of the place the first time around, eh?"  It was after a transfer to Atlanta by the magazine that I turned to the automobile doing the same in Rochester, New York, the Quad Cities and Los Angeles to get to work.  Being without a car in Los Angeles is nearly impossible and I stayed with wheels there and for three more years when I went to work in Chicago for Playboy Enterprises.  That was in 1968.  While big cities offer plenty of auto shortcomings, the Chicago lake route south to my office at Playboy wasn't bad and involved indoor parking for $27 a month.  The parking customers were largely Playboy employees and I never tried to figure that one out.  Maybe someone owed Hefner.  I needed a car for the magazine where so many working hours were at night.  My perky '66 powder blue Mustang convertible, parked one night in front of Hefner's State Parkway home, was the only car in the neighborhood untouched when The Weathermen smashed windows during the Democratic National Convention.  The car's windshield had a Playboy logo.

Most of my 22 years in Chicago utilized public transportation.  Maybe the greatest plus about it, certainly to readers, is the opportunity it affords them.  I once figured out my Chicago Transit Authority trips from and to the Wilmette Station (parking there most of the time for 50 cents and a buck a pop for the CTA) enabled me to read more than 11,000 hours worth.   

One of my great joys has been talking with members of the media whose stories made me aware that the unique qualities of some of the characters in Robert J. Casey's Such Interesting People were reflected in some of my contemporaries.  I got to thinking about Casey and his book maybe a month ago and determined to re-read it.  My thanks to both the Bellingham Public Library for obtaining it and the University of Oregon Library in Eugene for the loan. 

 Published in 1943 by Bobbs-Merrill, the book is an absolute classic and was touted to me by Bill Ashboldt, a photographer I worked with on the Lorain (Ohio) Journal.  Bill eventually moved on to the nearby Cleveland Plain Dealer and is best known for the many and widely-circulated photos he took of Sam Sheppard, neck in a brace.  Sheppard, a doctor convicted of murdering his wife, inspired The Fugitive TV series plus a feature film in addition to an enormously undeserved public chorus shouting Sam's innocence.  The latest is a Sheppard 60-minute "documentary" currently playing the ID Channel with a lot of facts either altered or cast aside.

Casey, who retired from Chicago journalism in 1947, would have loved covering the Sheppard trial.  On the other hand, he had his hands full back in his day with such interesting criminals as Al Capone, Dion O'Bannion, Tough Tommy Megrim and Peewee Poopopolos around and about.  Interestingly, the book's hoodlums are bit players to the journalism stars and eccentrics whose enterprising spirit and creative insanity made possible the greatest of the journalistic shows.

Casey nailed it as in: "The fantastic twenties! Those were the days when there were two cars in every bootlegger's garage and a corpse in every alley--when the kitchen smelled of raisin mash and the tattoo of bursting bottles marked the progress of the home-brew in the basement--when the best places to eat in the city were the speak-easies, or maybe your stomach was too paralyzed to tell--when scotch with a Southern accent cost twelve dollars a quart and the customers all seemed to have twelve dollars--when hearts were young and gay, and livers and lights, apparently, were more durable."

Having earned three citations for bravery in combat during World War I, Casey became an itinerant newsman before he made it in Chicago.  Joining the Chicago Daily News in 1920, he worked as a columnist and foreign correspondent.  He also wrote features, became an expert on the era's gang wars and traveled extensively.  Casey's coverage of World War II included Pearl Harbor and the blitz in London.  He authored 27 books.  All are worth your time.

While the emphasis of Such Interesting People is on Chicago editors including Henry Justin Smith of the Daily News, Walter Howey of the Tribune and Daily News and the American's  Harry Reutlinger plus the idiosyncratic approach to journalism by the reporters, there also are supporting walk-ons of stunning invention who became attached to newsrooms after wandering in off the streets.   

One was "The Ghost Catcher" who spoke with a pronounced German accent, said he was a proof reader and carried cards identifying himself as a "Ghost Catcher" whose name was Professor Otto Reichmann.  Claiming to be a catcher of considerable talent, he had once been hired by the Tribune as part of a claque that went around exposing spirit mediums, story matter probably accomplished by an artful end around Trib publisher Robert R. McCormick.

The Ghost Catcher, described by Casey as looking "like a relic of somebody else's elegance" quickly became a daily visitor to the Daily News and "like the sort of crank who usually pays visits to newspaper offices," temporarily lost out when the paper's publisher, Walter Strong, gave a tour of his brand new building to visiting publishers and editors from South America.  In an unfortunate piece of timing, the copy desk, located at the entrance to the news room, was missing its usual quota of habitues.  Only a "soiled old man in a grease-spotted overcoat and bilious-looking straw hat" sat writing something on a sheet of copy paper.  

Strong touched him on the shoulder asking: "I beg your pardon, but who are you?"

Professor Reichmann turned around and with an odd combination of surprise and indignation, shouted: "I sir," he cried, leaping to his feet, "I am The Ghost Catcher!"

Casey's delight is particularly apparent when he tells the story of Daily News editor Howey, formerly of the Tribune, who wrote a glowing editorial about the paper's leadership in sending a relief train downstate to do good deeds following a cyclone in Murphysboro.  The editorial soared in its successful attempt to properly describe the paper's humanity, timeliness of the project's execution and heroism, then decided what he had written deserved readership beyond that of his paper.  Giving a copy boy detailed instructions, the editor handed the lad a copy of the just-completed editorial scribbling a couple of words on it.  The lad made his way to the Tribune as directed to give the chief copy reader (identified as wearing an eyeshade) Howey's prose.  The scribbled note at the top read: McCormick: MUST.  The copy editor complied and the next edition of Col. McCormick's paper carried the bitter rival's self-congratulatory pronouncement atop the Editorial Page.  It was widely believe Howey had left McCormick's employ unhappily some years before, a likelihood backed up by Casey's suggestion that such a condition "would explain so well the little pleasantries that Mr. Howey extended to the Tribune."

Strong, the publisher who made the acquaintance of The Ghost Catcher, had limited association with the editorial side of the busi8ness and became upset with member of the business community who suggested Daily News reporters were careless.  Strong took public transportation between his home and office and eventually tired of the charges.  One day he invited the critics to dinner on top of the half-finished Daily News Building.  The critics arrived believing they were to be confronted by a gesture of conciliation.  Most of what they knew about the newspaper business was confined to what they saw at the movies.  Forced to make their way in the dark through piles of gravel, they eventually arrived by way of a wooden construction elevator at the 24th floor banquet room.  During the ride, there were strange echoes in the big building.

Strong never finished his opening line of welcome.  Writes Casey: "A man at the middle of the table who hadn't spoken much during the evening and didn't seem to know anybody suddenly pushed back his chair, jumped to his feet, pulled out a pistol and fired point-blank at the guest sitting opposite.  The guest fell over backward.  A police whistle shrieked outside.  The door opened and a woman was glimpsed in the entrance.  But only briefly.  As she stepped across the threshold the lights were out and there was another series of shots and two or three more screams.  An electric lantern flashed to reveal a brace of policemen and as that single ray of light died out the air was filled with a noise of clanking iron.  Then the lights flashed on again to discover the petrified diners in a number of odd attitudes and to reveal that both the murderer and corpse had gone away.  Where there had been a bedlam there was now a dead and terrifying quiet.  Through  it broke the voice of the host who oddly enough had begun to smile.

"Now, gentlemen," he said, "we shall see how good you are as reporters.  A waiter will give each of you a pad of paper and a pencil and you shall write out in your own way a record of what you saw just now--or what you thought you saw--and when your stories have been read aloud I shall entertain further suggestions about the improvement of my staff."

As Casey observed: The best brains of Chicago went to work then to prove what any cross-examiner knows about the fallacy of human testimony.  Mr. Strong burned the manuscripts before his guests took their way sheepishly to the terrifying elevator.  One wishes he hadn't."

Get the book if you can find it.  Anyone who enjoys reading about the kind of folks who made The Front Page possible will delight in Such Interesting People by Robert J. Casey.

And now, if you'll excise me, I have a bus to catch and the last chapter of the book to read.

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