The Press: Hearst's Howey

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"When a Hearst paper gets sick, they call me in, and I make it sicker."

Thus last week Walter Howey tossed aside the news that he had been called in to doctor the New York Mirror, sick Hearst tabloid. There was a polite little announcement by General Director Arthur Brisbane, who dug down in his bag of trick titles, pulled one out marked "news adviser" for Walter Howey. But what Director Brisbane did not say about "News Adviser" Howey would fill a bang-up book, had already tilled a feverish play, The Front Page. For Walter Howey is the man Playwrights Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur had in mind when they presented the character Walter Burns—the tough, smooth Chicago managing editor who stole the dead woman's stomach from the coroner's physician to prove she was poisoned; who scooped the town on a jailbreak, caught the mayor in skulduggery, shanghaied his ace reporter from his honeymoon all in three dizzy acts.

As city editor of the Chicago Tribune, later as managing editor of Hearst's Herald & Examiner during the most rough-&-tumble era of Chicago journalism, Walter Howey was a profane romanticist, ruthless but not cruel, unscrupulous but endowed with a private code of ethics. He was the sort of newsman who managed to have hell break loose right under his feet, expected similar miracles from his underlings, rewarded them generously. Undersized, unprepossessing, he was afraid of nothing.

Born 53 years ago in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Walter Howey was ousted from Blee's Military Academy at St. Joseph, Mo. for selling his horse. His family next sent him to Chicago Art Institute. Following a few nonproductive months, Walter pocketed what remained of his tuition money, chartered a small steamer, took the student body on a rollicking cruise of the Great Lakes. Back in Fort Dodge he persuaded his father to get him a job on the local paper. He loved it, swelled with pride when his weekly wage was raised from $5 to $10, finally to $15. Not until long afterward did his father tartly inform him that he had paid the wage from his own pocket. But Reporter Howey made his way to the Des Moines Daily Capital (defunct), thence on to Chicago.

A cub on Chicago's City Press Association, Howey was walking to City Hall to cover a routine meeting one winter day in 1903, when he saw smoke seeping from the Iroquois Theatre. Up through a sidewalk grating crawled a blackened figure in stage costume, then another & another. They gasped a few words about the carnage inside. Cub Howey dashed into a saloon next door, telephoned his editor (who was certain Howey was drunk), paid the bartender $5 to tie up the telephone, one of the few in the neighborhood. When the day was over, boxcar headlines were screaming "736 DEAD."