Word: pegler
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...from Sports. Born in Minneapolis, the son of a British-born newsman, Pegler dropped out of high school and landed a $10-a-week job as a United Press office boy at the age of 16. After World War I naval service, he turned to sportswriting, first for United Press, then for the Chicago Tribune. His flair for words made him a success. By 1929, he was earning $25,000 a year. In 1933, Scripps-Howard enticed him to write a more general column, and a dozen years later he shifted to Hearst's King Features Syndicate, where...
...Pegler reigned as the nation's most controversial pundit for three decades. As a name caller he had no equal. To be "Peglerized" became almost an honor. To Pegler, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was "little padrone of the Bolsheviki," Walter Winchell a "gents-room journalist," and Henry A. Wallace a "slobbering snerd." His most abiding hatred was for the Roosevelts. Berating F.D.R. and his family in column after column, he termed the President a "feebleminded fiihrer" and found it "regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara hit the wrong man when he shot at Roosevelt in Miami." He waged...
...Turning Point. Pegler's peculiar blend of talent and choler eventually became his undoing. He not only carried vituperation too far but became an advocate of far-right causes. As a result, he lost first his friends, then his readers, and finally his outlets. The turning point came when Pegler accused his onetime friend, Author-Journalist Quentin Reynolds, of "nuding along the public road" with "his wench, absolutely raw," and of bearing a "yellow streak." In the ensuing 1954 libel trial, Reynolds' lawyer, Louis Nizer, humiliated Pegler by reading him unidentified writings that Pegler dismissed as "the Communist...
...Inside. Pegler's career as a columnist ended in 1962 after he told a right-wing group in Tulsa that his Hearst bosses were censoring his columns in "a coercion as nasty and snarling as Hitler's." When Hearst, in effect, fired him, Pegler turned to writing for the John Birch Society journal, but quit when even Robert Welch rejected some of his articles...
...Pegler's only biographer, former New York Post Reporter Oliver Pilat, suggests that Pegler's tough-guy cynicism was only a professional pose, wholly out of character with his personal feelings of shyness, insecurity and educational inadequacy. He vented his frustrations at the typewriter. Those who knew him best preferred the private Pegler. "Somebody should take the hide off Peg," wrote Fellow Columnist Heywood Broun when Pegler was on top, "because the stuff inside is so much better than the varnished surface." Pegler's professional hide seemed mainly to toughen as he grew older. When it finally...