Pegler's Pa

Columnists, like most people, have families. Unlike most people, columnists often parade their close relatives before their public, to make a point or fill a stick. Constant readers know about the mothers of Hugh Johnson and Hey wood Broun, about Dorothy Thompson's son and Eleanor Roosevelt's husband. Last week Westbrook Pegler had a good story to tell about his father.

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,' my old man said and bowed out."

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 City. That got him back into the newspaper business and he moved on to the St. Paul Globe and then the Minneapolis Journal, which paid him $30 a week to be sports editor and cover special events such as the last war with the Indians.

In 1900 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, filed an exclusive story of the "bombing" six minutes after the explosion.

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's signed column. Pegler refers to Gauvreau as "that farcical Frenchman."

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."

As a newspaperman who never made more than $100 a week, Arthur Pegler is a little baffled by the money some people get. His younger son grew up to be an advertising man with a big income, and that was all right with him. But for Westbrook to make $46,000 a year writing for newspapers is to Arthur Pegler a stupendous joke on somebody. Mr. Pegler calls Westbrook "Buddy."

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