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Show pw"-1" 1 I LZ1 WHO'S NEWS THIS WEEK By LEMUEL F. PARTON NEW YORK.-In 1914, S. S. Mc-Clure Mc-Clure published his autobiography. autobiog-raphy. As he was only 57 at the time, it was a sort of juvenile prank and probably McClure's Early not seriously in-Autobiography in-Autobiography tended Now at , 82, he is busier Bat a Prologue tfaan ever writ. ing books and digging' Into social problems, and the word is that next September he will revive his McClure's Magazine. Lincoln StefTens, and others of his shining legions of dragon-slayers have passed, or else taken second thought, like Ida Tarbell, and, unless un-less things change a lot between now and next fall, he will find the same old dragons still around, and possibly quite a few litters of new ones, some of them strange breeds, and perhaps a bit scalier than any he ever knew. Two years ago, the whippy little lit-tle Irishman, with the rumpled hair and the rumpled suit, wrote a piece in which he indicated that the disquieting noises of the capitalist system were just body squeaks and that the engine was still all right. His idea is to go on from here, instead of backing up, and it is to be assumed that will be his take-off for the revived re-vived magazine. After 60 years of battling for civic righteousness righteous-ness he concludes that the United States Constitution is a changeless and unchangeable document, which will In time set everything right If we just stay within its ground rules. Still crackling with aphorisms and ' Greek quotations in his ninth decade, dec-ade, he might be reminiscent talking talk-ing about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theodore Roosevelt, William Dean Howells, Gilbert Parker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, James M. Bar-rie, Bar-rie, et al. But he is chock-full of today, and yesterday is just so much ink through the printing press. All the above and many others like them were his business and social intimates. He has probably led more famous writers in leash than any other man. In 1866, when he was nine years old, his parents, of a family fam-ily of farmers and carpenters, brought hha to a prairie farm in Indiana. He sold $1 microscopes micro-scopes on the street corners of Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth, and Chicago; worked his way through Knox college; got a $7-a-week job editing The Wheelman Wheel-man for the Pope Manufacturing Manufactur-ing company, started his syndicate, syn-dicate, and, in 1893, McClure's Magazine, in that other doleful day when his friends all said: "The funeral's tomorrow." He says he is just getting wound up. PAEL VAN DOREN denies there is any "new barbarism" in the world and says that what ailed us is the same old barbarism. There ni r i is a reminder Old Barbarism of this ancient H olds a Spell continuity in Over Van Dyke the choice of W. S. Van Dyke to direct the filming of Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here." Not that there is anything barbarous bar-barous about Mr. Van Dyke, but, as we recall it, he got his start helping help-ing direct D. W. Griffith's film, "Intolerance," "In-tolerance," which was a tolerably complete round-up of the old barbarism. bar-barism. That was 24 years ago, and the Sinclair Lewis opus picks up right where Messrs. Griffith and Van Dyke left off, without missing a flicker. In the world's fair time capsule, cap-sule, Mr. Van Dyke might be memorialized as the man who calls Greta Garbo "Kid" and gets away with it or as the man who once spanked Lupe Velez when she went temperamental tempera-mental on the lot. They call him the hard-boiled director with the velvet touch. He is a rugged, weather-beaten six-footer, a newsboy, miner, logger, stage-driver, expressman, grocery gro-cery clerk and laborer before he went to Hollywood. He got a toe-hold in Hollywood by selling a few scripts. At first he was one of many of Griffith's assistants, as-sistants, later one of his aces. Producers Pro-ducers like him because he goes straight through without water or feed. He used to make a full-length serial in nine days and a Western m three, writing his script as he He did many ju"6le and bouth Sea films, such as "Trader Horn" and "White Shadows." His father, a San Diego judge and a cousin of the late Henry Van Dyke, died when the boy was eight years old. Rustling hard to help his mother support the family accounts for his versatility ver-satility and his skill in ty,,c characterization, (Consolidated Featurea-WNU Service.) |
