The Press: Mr. Two Million Circulation

Broadway is busy, its nightclubs jammed (TIME, March 22), but Broad way columnists are writing less about Broadway than ever before. Time was when most Broadway columnists concentrated on bedroom trivia about marriages, divorces, impending births and who-was-that-lady items. Since the war began they have written more & more about national and international affairs. They still peep through keyholes and write in keyhole language, but now most of the keyholes are in Washington and Chungking doors.

The shift in emphasis came about be cause most Broadway columnists secretly yearn for the dignity that goes with straight news columning, and have used the war as a springboard for a leap into general punditry. And, trendwise as they are, all realize that mischievous chitchat is no commodity to market in wartime.

Most typical, perhaps, of the strictly Broadway columnists who have been lured to broader if not greener pastures is the New York Daily News's Danton Walker (real name: Dan). Five days a week Walker writes a column naturally enough entitled "Broadway," for an estimated 5,000,000 readers of the News, (circulation: 2,000,000) and seven other metropolitan newspapers. Only a handful of Danton Walker's columns this year have featured the old-style, peeping-Tom type of item; most of his columns, filled now chiefly with predictions, are about such non-Broadway matters as gas rationing, the Ruml tax plan, the war, Interior Secretary Ickes. Broadway Columnist Walker now works the universe.

Background for Broadway. Dapper Dan Walker became a Broadway columnist by accident. Georgia-born and 44 years old, he is a 145-lb. man with thin brown hair and a well-scrubbed look, who manages to look neat even after a seven-hour nightclub tour. He makes a fetish of cleanliness, gloomily anticipates a soap shortage, which he feels will be deliberate ly manufactured by the Government be cause "they'll want us to get used to living without soap so we'll be able to get along with all the foreigners who'll be coming in, after the war, under the Four Freedoms." Walker was literally shot out of school when he was twelve. A chum argued with him about a murder movie they had seen.

The chum picked up a pistol, said, "This is the way it was," and fired a bullet into Walker's chest. W7hen he recovered, as a juvenile pioneer he went west, worked as a Western Union messenger and clerk in San Francisco. Rejected by both the Army & Navy in World War I (under weight), he got overseas by joining a civilian corps under Army supervision.

After the war he stayed in Europe until 1921 working with the American Relief Administration, picked up French and a working knowledge of German and Czech.