"Simon Legree"

Above the execution chamber of Sing Sing Prison, in a small room comfortably furnished and brightly decorated, a grey old man lay sick abed last month. Because he had often before been "good copy," Manhattan newspapers reported him "dying." But prison officials said it was not so bad as that. He had failed considerably, they said. His rheumatism was much worse. They had tried to move him to the prison hospital. But his sunken grey-green eyes had blazed refusal.

Just so had this prisoner, Charles E. Chapin, 72, longtime city editor of the New York Evening World, refused many an offer of freedom. He went to prison willingly, eagerly, twelve years ago for killing his wife.

Many a newsman, famed and obscure, remembers when "C. C." was called from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1896 by the late famed Joseph Pulitzer to take the city desk of the Evening World. In the next 20 years City Editor Chapin won his nickname, "Simon Legree of Park Row." Brilliant, erratic, hardbitten, utterly ruthless, he feared no one. was feared by many, his underlings included. Also he made many a friend, none more loyal than his Reporter Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb. Author Zona Gale worked for "C. C."; so did Barton Currie (later editor of Country Gentleman, Ladies' Home Journal, World's Work), Will Inglis (secretary to John D. Rockefeller), Lindsay Denison (still a crack staffman on the Evening World), and Ralph Pulitzer, now the World's publisher. Joseph Pulitzer Jr., now publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was fired by C. C. "for laziness."

Chapin suffered from two afflictions: tuberculous throat and a thirst for gambling. Driven from work by the first ailment in 1914, he took leave of absence, won a fortune in the sugar market, lost everything--including some money entrusted to him--when the outbreak of the war closed the Stock Exchange. Back in Manhattan he became more and more deeply involved. Extravagant living made hopeless any effort to pay his debts. At the end of four years a court demand for an accounting of his trust caused the final break. Walking with his wife one day Chapin was accosted by an aged beggar woman. His wife shuddered and said: "Suppose I should come to that." Chapin, already planning suicide, feared what might befall his wife after he was gone. That night in their room in the Hotel Plaza, he shot her, watched for two hours until she was dead. Then he forgot his plan to kill himself, walked the town and rode the subway all night, mechanically turned toward his office in the morning. On his way, a headline caught his eye: "Charles Chapin Wanted for Murder." He walked into police headquarters.

Chapin took no interest in his trial or in the formidable defense counsel, headed by George Woodward Wickersham, whom the court appointed. He pleaded guilty, took a sentence of 20-years-to-life. Immediately Prisoner Chapin was made editor of the Sing Sing Bulletin. At the instance of Author Basil King he wrote his book, Charles Chapin's Story. But the real substance of his prison life has been his gardening. First with his tobacco money, later with outside help (including a check every month from onetime Reporter Cobb), he set out his beautifully landscaped plots.

Prisoner Chapin's sentence was commuted to make him eligible for parole in 1933 but he did not care. Irvin Cobb and others pleaded with him to accept a pardon offered by Governor Alfred Emanuel Smith. To all he replied: "I am too old to go out in the world now."

Kindly Warden Lewis E. Lawes is his great & good friend; but legend to the contrary, Prisoner Chapin is no "power behind the throne."

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