Word: pegler
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Ever since William R. Hearst Jr. took command of the family's papers, the chain's columnists have been getting some hard editing and trimming by the boss. Last week Westbrook Pegler, who has seen the blue penciling on the wall, drafted a new set of ground rules for himself and proved he was still master of the humorous, wry style that made him famous before he became a bore. Wrote Pegler...
...great trouble with you, Pegler, is that you write too damn long. You run on and on like a hack driver's dream, bloviating about unions and the Constitution and the income tax, and you forget the white paper has been going up and up and that a newspaper has got to set a table of smorgasbord, with some of this and some of that ... to hold the readers who draw the advertisers who pay your princely stipend. Why don't you write more funny stuff? ... I guess you don't want people to know you still...
...vaudeville stretching his laughs and sweating his bows and keeping the other acts hanging around cracking peanuts or laundering their tights in the basin when it would have been more effective to quit on a loud laugh five minutes sooner . . . The trouble with you, Pegler, is when you have got nothing more to say you say it, and say it, and say it. when the thing to do is to stop right here...
...hard time covering the story. There were not enough badges for half the newsmen who wanted them. One newsman, told by Republican Chairman Guy Gabrielson that all his press tickets were gone, got some right away from Chicago's Democratic Boss Jack Arvey. Terrible-tempered Columnist Westbrook Pegler was so outraged by the back-row seat he was assigned that he denounced the "leftwing standing committee that put me way out here in left field." Snapped back Gallery Boss Harold Beckley, who also runs the U.S. Senate's press gallery: "He could write the stuff...
...other journalistic hazards far from the convention hall itself. A column by Scripps-Howard's Robert Ruark ("Doug was a dud as a keynoter") was stopped after it turned up alongside an editorial praising General MacArthur's speech as "A Call to Arms." Hearst papers killed a Pegler column saying Eisenhower is "a stupid man [and] I will do all I can to prevent his election...