Man on the Beat

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's veteran Federal Building reporter, Ray A. (for Archibald) Webster once took aggressive pity on an underpaid reporter from an opposition paper. "Listen, you," Webster gruffly told him, "the Star is going to have to raise you to $50 a week or I'll scoop you every day--and you tell your managing editor that." The Starman meekly passed on the warning and was speedily raised to $50 a week to keep Webster from carrying out his threat. There was no doubt that he could carry it out. For most of the 40 years he has covered the federal beat for the city staff of the PD, big (250 Ibs., 6 ft. 4 in.), jovial Ray Webster ("You'll never get a story until you show some sources you can drink more than they can") has been undisputed dean of the "beat men," a vanishing breed of U.S. newsmen who are more at home in the federal and county buildings and city halls than the public officials they cover.

Last week in St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch celebrated the retirement of Ray Webster, 65, with a special, four-page newspaper, Webster Good Times ("Published Once--and That's Enough"), which regretfully headlined: SCOOPS WILL

BE SCARCER AS LAST OF OLD MASTERS PREPARES TO TAKE IT EASY.

Saloon Expense Account. Reporter Webster seldom took it easy on his beat, telephoned in to rewritemen tips and stories that helped the crusading P-D break scores of exclusives on everything from protection rackets and gambling to a series on corruption on the federal bench that won a Pulitzer Prize. Many of his sources were cultivated after hours in a bar across the street from the Federal Building, where Webster was the only P-D reporter to have a special "saloon expense account." His expense account also included other unorthodox items. Once he bought an overcoat to go to Indianapolis to cover a crime story. When other reporters refused to believe that he had charged the coat to the PD, Webster told them stiffly: "If you're going to act like an office boy, you'll be treated like an office boy and you'll stay cold. I happen to be a Post-Dispatch reporter and I intend to act like one--a warm one." (The paper paid.)

His prodigious memory stored up more facts than the federal records. One judge so respected Webster's accuracy that he fell into the habit of delivering oral opinions, using Webster's report of them as the written opinion. Once, in court, while covering the arraignment before a federal commissioner of a man charged with stealing, Webster decided that the evidence had been obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment (illegal search and seizure). Webster took over as the man's lawyer and got him freed.

When Webster picked up a story too trivial for the PD, he often gave it to other reporters on the beat, especially cubs he was helping to get started. After one such story appeared in an opposition paper, a P-D editor heatedly told Webster to phone in all stories in the future, let the editors decide whether they wanted to use them or not. Within 24 hours, the harried editor begged for mercy and rescinded his order; he had found time to do little else but talk to Webster on the phone. Another time, Webster sheepishly phoned the city desk to report he had been scooped by his own brother, Archie, who had left the P-D staff the week before to work for the competing St. Louis Star. "Are you drunk?" the city editor thundered. "You turned in that story a half hour ago." Webster was dumfounded until his brother explained to him that he had phoned in the story--by mistake. From force of habit he had absentmindedly telephoned the story in to the PD, just as he had been doing in the past, instead of to his own paper.

Whisky for Cribbage. In St. Louis, where Webster was born, he knew everyone. The son of a printer, Webster quit school after the fifth grade, got a job as a soda jerk at a local theater, later drove a grocery wagon and went to work "as a pioneer in St. Louis aviation," i.e., working in an aerial-balloon shop (he went up only once himself). At 21, he became a sportswriter for the St. Louis Star, was soon writing stories at space rates for the PD, sold so many that the P-D found it could save money by hiring him as a full-time reporter for $153 week.

For a time, he was part-owner of a poolroom "catering to a small but exclusive clientele which sought to defend its judgment of thoroughbred horses with cash." In the pressroom of the Federal Building, he ruled the cribbage table with an iron hand. Once a local benefactor offered to provide the pressroom with a cribbage board to keep orderly scores instead of totaling them on scraps of paper, as the reporters had been doing. Webster turned down the offer, explained: "We're well satisfied with our system" since a lawyer in the Federal Building used their daily cribbage totals to play the numbers and bought the newsmen a bottle of bourbon every time he won.

Webster sometimes made news as well as reporting it. During Prohibition, a federal agent haled a local soda-fountain owner into court on a charge of selling liquor in his store. "Can you identify the man who sold you the drink?" the prosecutor asked. Confidently the agent pointed at Reporter Webster. The case was quickly dismissed. Explained Webster later: "I did serve that man a drink. I was in the place and saw him snooping around out front. I told the barkeep to go to the John and said I would serve the stooge if he came in." Last week, on the eve of his retirement, Webster made a typical announcement as his farewell to the P-D staff. Said he. in a paraphrase of the credo of the P-D's Founder Joseph Pulitzer, "I know that my retirement will make no difference in the cardinal principles of P-D reporters; they will always realize that what the city editor doesn't know won't hurt him."

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