Word: runyon
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...Club (sponsored by Marshall Field's Pocket Books, Inc.) set out a year ago to wean youngsters away from the comics. As more suitable fare for growing minds, a committee of teachers and librarians picked a list of 50 books ranging from Shakespeare's Tragedies to Damon Runyon Favorites. Last week the club celebrated its birthday by totting up first-year sales: the 90,000 members had bought nearly 600,000 books...
...Hepcats. It was quite a "sack of jack," Robbins conceded, for the law graduate who seven years ago took an an-.. nouncing job with Baltimore's WITH at $17.50 a week. And every cent of it had been hard-earned. Like Walter Winchell and the late Damon Runyon, Robbins had almost singlehanded created his own "language," and built his audience by teaching it to them (see box). He started with a few scattered scat idioms picked up from jazzmen, rapidly invented new ones on principles of alliteration, assonance and (occasionally) metaphor...
...needing money, he returned to fiction with sardonic, sentimental fairy tales like Three Wise Guys, the story of the Nativity retold in Runyon's "historical present," by a modern Grimm who talked out of the corner of his mouth. With Howard Lindsay, he turned out a play, A Slight Case of Murder. A score of his stories (Little Miss Marker, etc.) became movies; a few, like The Big Street (1942) he produced himself. Hearst christened The Brighter Side, the daily column where Runyon's endearing ignoramuses, Joe and Ethel Turp, were born...
...Runyon had signed his first sports story for Hearst's old New York American with his full name, and Sports Editor Harry Cashman, striking out the Alfred, told him, "From now on you're Damon Runyon." The byline was to make him several millions as a war correspondent, fictioneer, movie producer, columnist, all-round reporter and tamperer with the language. His Broadwayese delighted Britons as well as Americans; and grammarians were alarmed by the numbers who preferred Runyon's English to the King's. Webster never told them that a G was $1,000, a wrong...
Hokum & Horseplay. To his celebrity friends, to budding sportswriters and the pathetic heavyweights he fed in the forlorn hope of some day owning a champ, Runyon was a hokum-laden, horseplaying, teetotaling, coffee-drinking (up to 40 cups a day, some said) legend. It was a legend clad neatly and gaudily in $200 suits, loud Charvet ties, studs and cuff links made out of gold pieces-and shoes at $50 a pair, broken in for him by the late Hype Igoe, a sports scribe who also wore size 5B. Like most rich Broadwayites, Runyon commuted from Manhattan to Miami...