The Press: O'Malley of the Sun

"Got as far as first year in Wiilkes-Barre High School. Flopped.

"Three years at Notre Dame University, mostly managing football team. Flopped.

"Four years an art student in Philadelphia, devoting most of the time to studies of esthetic anatomy at Trocadero Burlesque Theatre.

"Commercial illustrator in New York for four years, drawing full-length portraits of vacuum cleaners and canned soup.

"Reporter, New York Morning Sun for 14 years, 13 of which were spent in Jack's restaurant.

"Had two plays, The Head of the House and A Certain Party produced on Broadway. Both terrible flops.

"Wrote two books. The War Whirl in Washington and The Swiss Family O'Malley, the entire first editions of which are still on sale. . . .

"Kindly, strikingly handsome, but all things considered, an all-around flop."

That was the obituary that Frank Ward O'Malley wrote for himself long after he became "O'Malley of the Sun," one of Manhattan's truly famed newspaper reporters, old style. He quit the newspaper business in 1919, wrote undistinguished magazine articles, moved to Europe, faded from the limelight. Yet when he died last week at 56 in France, "O'Malley of the Sun" was still news all over the country. Editorials mourned the passing of a Great Reporter. Colyumist F. P. Adams called him "the perfect and utter newspaperman."

Like most of Reporter O'Malley's copy, his mock autobituary is fanciful. Born in Pittston, Pa., he belonged to a family far from obscure. Of his four brothers, all dead. Joseph, John and Austin were physicians. Brother Austin, eight years Professor of English Literature at Notre Dame University, gained fame as a scientist and oculist. Also he was a Latin scholar, conducted voluminous correspondence with Popes Leo XIII and Benedict XV. Brother William was a naval captain. Frank began work as a smalltown newspaper cartoonist in Pennsylvania, quit when a mine foreman whom he had caricatured fell down a shaft and was killed.

Short, slim Frank O'Malley was 31 when, in 1906, the late Editor Selah Merrill ("Boss") Clarke of the Sun hired him as a reporter. New at the profession, O'Malley showed no greenness. His intimates say "he was born sophisticated." Within a few weeks he was roving the streets, a "space man." His first week on space netted him $72.58, princely for that day. Added to a good reporter's alertness to detail were O'Malley's Irish humor and sensitivity to pathos. Combined they made him a master of the human interest story. Also they enabled him to whip out columns of newspaper humor when news was thin. The Sun printed them at prodigious length.

Even without a byline, Sun readers could recognize O'Malley stories. But it was his brothers in the craft who best appreciated how much O'Malley could make of scant material. Essentially he was a newsman's newsman.