The Press: Old Timers

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On his way to San Francisco for the convention of the American Newspaper Guild, of which he is president, Columnist Heywood Broun last week took a sideswipe at the employer who is soon to unemploy him. Said he:

"I don't want to stir up any bitter feeling about foreign nations lying to the west of us, but I do say that I would regret to see further aggression on the part of a nation all of whose admirals and generals seem to look precisely like Roy W. Howard."

Last fortnight Columnist Broun advertised for a job (TIME, July 31), thereby publicly setting himself up as the No. 1 example of an oldtime newspaperman whose career has followed the conventional graph (reporter to critic to columnist) and who now needs work. There are thousands like him, for the number of U. S. daily newspapers had decreased by 211 in a decade. Time was when a good man could always get a job and the itinerant newspaperman was one of the most colorful figures in the land. He was hard-drinking, amorous, industrious when sober, able whether sober or drunk. Today these footloose reporters and copyreaders have nearly all died or settled down. The old timers who are left look back with nostalgia on the gaudier days of their profession, but stick to their jobs if they have jobs. Luckier than Newspaperman Broun last week were these hoary and, in their spheres, famed and typical oldtimers:

Police Reporter Kenneth George Bellairs returned from his vacation to the St. Louis police department, which he has covered, off & on, for one paper or another, since 1891. Son of a British Army captain who came to the U. S. to grow beans and ran the St. Louis zoo instead, Jock Bellairs went to work for the old St. Louis Globe in 1890, when he was 21. He left the Globe for the Chronicle, left the Chronicle for the Post-Dispatch, left the Post-Dispatch to return to the Star-Chronicle, which, as the Star-Times, now pays him his salary. Sitting in the press room at headquarters one day in 1898, Reporter Bellairs heard four bombs go off, the Chronicle's signal to the city that the Spanish-American War had started. Said he jokingly: "In a few minutes the phone will ring and it'll be Tarbell telling me that I'm to cover the war." In a few minutes the phone did ring and Managing Editor David Tarbell told surprised Jock Bellairs that he was to cover the war. Correspondent Bellairs scooped Richard Harding Davis and many another prima donna on the attack on the U. S. torpedo-boat Winslow, returned to St. Louis a newspaperman's hero, went back to covering police. Around him have been woven some of the best-known newspaper apocrypha of that newspaperman's town. Samples:

>Bellairs and his colleagues on the police beat used to accost farmers bringing produce to the city, demand a license for each separate vegetable, give the frightened farmers mock trials in the press room at headquarters, fine them, buy whiskey with the booty.

>Bellairs & friends once borrowed the corpse of a Chinese from the morgue, took it to a saloon, ordered plenty of drinks, left the Chinese to pay the bill. The bartender shook the Chinese to awaken him, knocked him down, tried desperately to hide the body while Bellairs & Co., peering through the window, howled with ribald glee.