Word: pegler
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Speaking of gate crashing, Pegler told how his father once got into a meeting where examiners were going over the papers of an absconding bank president in Chicago. "He just walked in, laid his stick and gloves on the board table and said, 'Well, let us proceed to business, gentlemen,' and somehow the examiners thought he was the banker's lawyer and the lawyers thought he was an examiner until he got up to catch an edition. Someone then asked him, 'And whom do you represent?' 'Hearst's Chicago American...
...Arthur Pegler's son Westbrook could tell many another story of his old man, for the elder Pegler is a living example of the oldtime newspaperman. He went to work for the London Daily Telegraph before he was 20 and quit the New York Daily Mirror year before last at 73. In 1884 he landed in New York from a freighter and headed west. For three years he rode the range in the Dakotas and Iowa, then covered the trial of a brewer for the murder of a Methodist temperance leader who had put over local option in Sioux...
...Pegler went to work for the Chicago American, stayed there 15 years, under such famed managing editors as Victor Watson and Foster Coates. He covered the Belle Gunness murder case in La Porte, Ind. (she cut off the heads of nine Swedish swains), chased an imaginary Belle Gunness all the way to Victoria, B. C. only to learn that she was Victoria's mayor's sister-in-law. A man of action, Pegler once got bored covering a dull riot story in Rock Island, Ill., set off a brace of giant firecrackers under the mayor's window...
...Pegler left the American in 1915, worked three years on the Chicago Journal, where he broke in a couple of cubs named Lowell Thomas and Ben Hecht. In 1918 Pegler joined Terry Ramsaye in Manhattan to crash the moving picture business. Ramsaye stuck and became the historian of the industry, but after a few years Pegler was hired at $250 a week by a company which promptly folded. He went back to newspapering, first on the Tribune, then the Daily News, finally the Mirror. When he retired from the Mirror he was writing all the editorials and Editor Emile Gauvreau...
Since his retirement Newspaperman Pegler has been living in Madison, Conn, and writing (on a double-keyboard Smith-Premier typewriter he acquired in 1893) a book of reminiscences tentatively entitled 50,000 Deadlines. His language, both written and spoken, reveals the origin of his son Westbrook's self-consciously polysyllabic style. Arthur Pegler finds people parsimonious instead of stingy, takes a libation in preference to a drink. He speaks of a publisher he once worked for as "that ineffable screw...