Word: billing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Born in Dallas, Tex., Bill was captain of a prep-school (Terrill) football team that overwhelmed 114-0 another team on which played Bo McMillin and Red Weaver, stars of a great Centre College eleven a few years after; went on to Dartmouth with a football scholarship, made Walter Camp's All-America second team in his senior year. Meanwhile he had spent two years in France as a first lieutenant of Artillery...
Back in Texas, Elijah William Cunningham went to work as a reporter for the Dallas News, at the same time coached Southern Methodist University's football team. One of his jobs as a reporter was to interview Arctic Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Bill, married only a few days, took his bride along to impress her. But Stefansson was irritable. Said he: "If you are any kind of reporter you won't need to take notes." Thereupon he tore through a staccato monologue, dismissed his interviewer...
Hopping mad, Bill Cunningham went back to the office to write a blistering story about Stefansson. On the way, his wife handed him some sheets of paper. It was the interview, taken down in shorthand behind the explorer's back. Bill had not known his wife could take shorthand, because he had never met her (except for a few minutes before a football game) until the day they were married. He had called her by long-distance telephone at her home in Attleboro, Mass., to transact some other business, ended by asking her to marry...
...Boston Post wired Bill, asked him to cover a post-season football game between Texas A. & M. and Centre College. The Post wanted 500 words. That day the great Bo McMillin was married, his bride sat wrapped in a blanket on the players' bench with a corsage pinned to her shoulder, and unknown A. & M. licked Centre 18-6. Bill started sending in his story, paused after 1,500 soulful words to ask whether they wanted him to stop. Back came the Post's answer: "Pour it on." So Bill sent another 1,500 words...
About that time Mrs. Cunningham decided that Texas summers were too hot. Bill wrote to the Post, asked for a job at $50 a week (the Dallas News was paying him $55) and got it. But when he opened his first pay envelope in Boston he found $75. "There's been a mistake," Bill told his Sports Editor. "I'm only making $50." Said the Sports Editor: "Keep it, you dumb bastard-that's what you should have asked for in the first place." Bill kept it. He has never had to ask the Post...