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Show 5'!.' f t ' 1 VK S KllilJS When Hi Modrrwell was covering Uit Rome beat (or a Chicago gazette he exposed some Fascist barbarisms barba-risms This so incensed one of them, he slapped Hi's face during a dance Not wishing to cause any excitement, ex-citement, because his companion (the wife of a friend) expected an heir. Moderwell ignored the insult . The next day a Rumanian crisis cri-sis forced him to fly to Bucharest. At once Rome was sprayed with talk that the American was a coward. That he had been slapped and then left Italy by plane, etc. When Hi returned to Rome his best pals told him the only way to disinfect dis-infect the ugly situation would be to fight a duel. The challenge became trie topic of every European correspondent, corre-spondent, but Hi had other ideas ... He entered the explosive Fascist's Fas-cist's lair, told him Americans do I not fight with swords and then flat- tened him with a sock on the jaw j . . . Then Hi challenged him to a j duel with swords, pistols or anything else . . . The next day the duel , was cancelled because Moderwell was not a gentleman! This legend concerns Ted Thaek-ery, Thaek-ery, the Post's managing editor. Ted has the distinction of becoming the m. e. of a paper he once peddled In the Midwest . . . Then he came to New York, and because his boss paid him off in bigger compliments compli-ments than wages, he developed a cynical attitude ... As a result, he was demoted to a Job on one of the publisher's other rags ... He surprised sur-prised the higher-ups by accepting it, and so they fired him. Very unfairly, un-fairly, he felt . . . Despite his years with the outfit, he was left penniless. He had the courage to perform this legendary exploit. He returned to the town where he was a noted figure, fig-ure, and on the same corner where he started peddling papers, he once more newsby'd the paper of which he once was head man . . . The town buzzed with the tale and his shamefaced employer, rather than have "the storv" confirmed made him m. e. again but of a branch publication in China. During the exciting twenties Vic Watson, then city ed of the N. Y. American, assigned reporter Nat Ferber to expose crooked brokerage houses . . . These bucketshops were cleaning up, trimming the chumps, and to do this they had powerful underworld contacts, of course . . . That's just what Watson and Ferber suspected . . . One day while they attended a hearing of a brokerage case, held in a deserted street late in the night, Ferber happened to look out a window and noticed that in every doorway a figure lurked ... He thought fast ... He phoned his paper to rush down every photographer on the staff to take photos of every person on that street . . Whpn thA flnchUdhtc 1 . puycu the lurkers fled . . . The cameramen camera-men did a swell job many photos matched several rogues gallery Rembrandts. George Bernard Shaw's music: "People who read my Prefaces are repelled by what they choose to term my arrogance their word for my habit of telling the painful truth. And people who read what other folks say about me are revolted by my callousness the average journalist's jour-nalist's word for the irritating way in which I keep my head while the rest of mankind are losing theirs . . . Thus, everyone who doesn't know me firmly believes me to be quite the most unpleasant person alive; and as a consequence all I have to do with people who meet me lor the first time is to be just reasonably rea-sonably polite, in order to convey an impression of superhuman charm." Sports writer Harry Grayson fears no man, and like most sports chroniclers, chron-iclers, often wields the hammer with great effect. Harry's pride and joy is Harry Jr . . . One day Papa Grayson met a friend and amazed him by devoting the entire gabfest to raving about what a great guy -"!.. J T5-..- .... ... "J ocauy was. "tie s the most wonderful man I ever met," said Grayson. "How do you figure that out?" inquired the listener. "How do I figure it out?" yelled Harry. "Why. when I took my kid to his circus, Beatty let him go in the cage with the Hons!" Nunnally Johnson, who pens pieces between movies, had a quarrel quar-rel with a colyumist over a trivial matter sometime ago. The latter recently patty-caked one of Nunnal-ly's Nunnal-ly's mag pieces. He wired the colyumist: col-yumist: "Many thanks. Your kisses are still exciting." When the Japanese police arrested arrest-ed James Young of International News, they found a radio script in his papers ... For several days they 3rd-degreed him about a gal named "Purina" . . . "Your Russian Rus-sian girl friend? A Portuguese dancer? One of your assistant spies' Who is Purina?" ... He finally convinced them that the script was the opening radio program (produced (pro-duced a year before) of "The Inside Story of Al Jolson," in which reporter re-porter Young acted. "Purina" being a St. Louis sponsor's cereal. |