Word: cunningham
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...profession notorious for the latitude it allows its writers, Bill Cunningham writes absolutely as he pleases. On the day after Britain declared war on Germany he began his column: "There's blood on the paper this morning." That day (as frequently happens) he had nothing at all to say about sports. "They bury a world when they go to war," wrote Bill Cunningham, who knew. "Yeah. Walk softly, and with your hat in your hand...
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...
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...
...Bill Cunningham is no scholarly sportswriter like John Kieran of the New York Times. He is fast (in two hours he can file 3,000 words on a championship fight without ruffling his sandy hair), and has a flair for embroidering them with sentiment and drama...