The Press: Last Column

Last week Hey wood Broun wrote his final column for the New York World-Telegram. It was a farewell to dapper little Roy Howard, who had been his boss for almost twelve years. Said Broun, polite as always, though he dictated from his bed in a Manhattan hotel, where he lay ill with grippe: "There were fights, frenzies, some praise and a lot of dough, and a good deal of fun in my relationship with Roy." Said Roy Howard, also polite, in a note appended to Broun's column: "Heywood was occasionally a bit of a headache. But like many another headache, he was worth the price."

That night an ambulance went clanging through the streets of Manhattan, carrying Heywood Broun's great bulk to the hospital. His grippe had turned into pneumonia, and he was gravely ill. Never in good health, his heart weakened by years of hard work and good living, Broun was close to death. As he fought his fever in a dim room high above the Hudson River, in the Presbyterian Hospital's Harkness Pavilion, he could reflect that he had at least put all his varied affairs in order.

Last fortnight Broun celebrated his sist birthday, his 31st year as a newspaperman. A prodigious writer in spite of his pose of indolence, he figured that he had turned out close to 21,000,000 words. He had also managed to paint pictures, run for Congress, organize a labor union, make innumerable speeches, run a little weekly newspaper of his own, remember the Holy Sacrament, spend hours on end eating & drinking with his friends in such Manhattan night spots as the Stork Club and 21.

Son of an impeccably clothed, British-born wine merchant, Broun spent four years at Harvard, never got his degree. He tried three times to make the Crimson, failed each time. In 1910 he went to work as sports editor of the New York Morning Telegraph, was fired two years later. Then he went to the Tribune as a reporter, became a rewrite man, copyreader, Sunday magazine editor, dramatic critic, book reviewer, finally columnist.

Broun's baseball stories for the Tribune have been called the best ever written. But it was after he transferred to the World, as a columnist in 1921 that his career really began. His column, It Seems to Me, ran for 18 years, first in the World, then in Scripps-Howard's Telegram, later in the World-Telegram, when Publisher Howard merged the two papers in 1931. But in all of them it was informal, effortless, personal. A man of tremendous heart and unfailing kindness, Broun was led by his sympathies first into Socialism, then to the brink of Communism, though he never actually joined the Communist Party.

He wrote a sober obituary on the death of Socialist Eugene V. Debs in 1926, two bitter columns on Sacco & Vanzetti the year after. In 1933 he announced his resolve to start a union for reporters. A few months later the American Newspaper Guild was founded, with Broun as chairman. Most of its routine work was done by other officers, but Broun was always the Guild's presiding saint: his rotund figure constantly protected it.

Twice married (first to the late Lucy Stone League President Ruth Hale, who gave him a son, Heywood Hale Broun), he was converted to Catholicism after his marriage in 1935 to a onetime actress, Constantina Maria Incoronata Druscella