All Comers Met

All Comers Met In his deadpan, wryly humorous column, Meeting All Comers, in the Houston Post, H. (for Hubert) Mewhinney has earned a reputation as the city's know-it-all. He advises readers on such diverse subjects as how to rid their chimneys of bats, how to tell a male cocklebur from a female cocklebur (a female has burs), and whether armadillos are good to eat (they are). No one catches H. Mewhinney with his patter down. When one fan insisted that bookkeeper was the only English word with three double letters, Mewhinney gave him at least three more: "Poo-peepee (a seaman who is peeped at from a poop deck), raccoonnookkeeper (the custodian of a coon hollow) and barroom-moodduller (one who dulls the jovial mood in a barroom)." When another reader asked him to explain the Truman Doctrine in one-syllable words, Mewhinney obliged--in 285 one-syllable words.

When one reader contended that the inside of a watermelon is white until air reaches it and oxidizes it to red, Mewhinney gravely answered: "On July 10, 1893, Dr. Ebenezer P. Humford, F.R.S., LL.D., F.L.S., Ph.D., succeeded in slicing a watermelon inside a glass-encased vacuum at Wallace-Huxley Technological Institute, Hyannis, Neb. Wholly untouched by oxygen, the melon was red." An impressed reporter asked how he could remember so many facts. Soberly, Mewhinney said: "I am blessed with total recall."

A longtime newsman (26 years, nine papers), 46-year-old Texan Mewhinney does not regard himself as a columnist but as a "pick & shovel newspaperman," and still spends part of his week as a rewrite man. But his vast curiosity and freewheeling pedantry make him an ideal man for Meeting All Comers. In his spare time, he reads Latin, has taught himself to play the piano and has become a self-confessed authority on arrowhead making, jazz, Government regulations, paleontology, ornithology and coon-hunting.

Unlike most columnists, Mewhinney tries to discourage letter writers. His reasons: "I have no secretary, and most letters from newspaper readers are either silly or ignorant. For years, the most famous men in England have written letters to the Times. In this country, the people who write letters for the newspaper editorial pages are mostly screwballs, nincompoops or monomaniacs. But the newspapers keep right on printing them."

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