City Editor

Amid the busy din and jingle in the New York Herald Tribune's city room one afternoon last week, one of the city editor's telephones rang.

"Hello, Stanley," said a petulant woman's voice. ''Aren't you going to keep our date?"

"What date? Who is this?"

Bit by bit the woman's story came out. A handsome gentleman in a fine automobile had picked her up at 110th Street the day before, wined her, dined her, told her that he was City Editor Stanley Walker of the Herald Tribune. He had made an appointment with her for the following day, promised to show her the Herald Tribune's plant, go to dinner, the theatre, a night club. He had failed to appear.

Editor Walker assured the lady that he could not drive a car, had never owned one, never went above 59th Street. Following up the story, he asked her to come to his office. Soon she flounced in, a comely Jewess. Taking one look at ruffled, bird-like Editor Walker, she said: "You're right. He was much better looking than you are." Amused and annoyed, he set out to find his impersonator. The Herald Tribune did not print the story.

Most metropolitan newspapermen know and like three Walkers: Jimmie, Johnny and Stanley. Jimmie is the wisecracking Mayor. Johnny is a kind of Scotch whiskey. Stanley is currently the most famed, most colorful city editor in town. Around him grows a fine garden of anecdote.

Short, wiry, hardbitten, he was born 33 years ago on a Texas ranch. He went to the University of Texas, later worked for a while on the Dallas News. In 1919 he broke into New York on the old Herald. He was never an outstanding reporter. He stayed with the Herald when Frank Andrew Munsey merged it with the now defunct morning Sim and when Ogden Reid merged it with his Tribune.

He works his staff hard, himself harder. A day with Stanley Walker might begin at 10 a. m. and last (if he is taking both the day and night desks) until midnight. It might include lunch at the Algonquin or a bite with some of his staff in Blake's, the Herald Tribune saloon. Back at his desk, smoking innumerable cigars, he would see the first edition onto the presses, return to Blake's, catch a midnight train out to Great Neck, L. I. where he lives. On the train he reads one of the early editions so he can telephone back further instructions when he gets home.

Like all good newsmen. Editor Walker's chief hate is inaccuracy; in particular, misspelling of names in the news. Once, when he himself misspelled District Attorney Thomas C. T. Grain's name in a Sunday feature story, his night staff sent him a wry wire:

STANISLAUS V. WALKER,

GREAT NECK, L. I.

WHOS LOONEY NOW

DISTRICT ATTORNEY

C. T. TOMASO KOHN

Editor Walker is married, has one daughter, is expecting another child. First to break the news publicly was, of course, gabby Colyumist Walter Winchell of the Mirror. Editor Walker read the squib, remarked: "Well, I guess this is all right-- as long as I get a by-line."

The Walker testament about himself, the newspaper business and his staff (which he considers the best ever assembled) appears currently in American Mercury. Excerpts:

"While natural economic forces are working, here are three suggestions for alleviating the present state of affairs and setting journalism on new paths of glory: 1) Let every editor argue persistently for fair pay and a reasonable future security for his good men. 2) Let every newspaper of any size either fire or pension the high-priced ornaments and incompetent fuddy-duddies who now clutter up the place. Replace them, if they must be replaced, with ambitious young men who will work. 3) Tear down most or all of the schools of journalism and set the inmates to studying English, history, literature, economics, foreign languages, law or beekeeping. . . .

"City editors in temperament range all the way from the savage old curmudgeons of fiction to the fumbling, frightened softies one so often meets in real life. . . . But whatever they are, none is really as good as he should be. The job is one at which a man may work at top speed 24 hours a day and still not get everything done right. . . . The most reasonable analogy that comes to mind is between a city editor and the manager of a baseball team. . . . Each knows the disappointment of seeing a presumably good man fall down on his job. and the thrill of a neat piece of work by a newcomer. . . .

"Lucky is the city editor or the baseball manager who can do his stuff without giving way to the jitters. He'd better be calm. If he isn't, sooner or later the city editor will be reading copy, probably in Pittsburgh, or helping somebody on a publicity job, or pasting up clippings and mumbling to himself; and the baseball manager will end his days as an umpire in the Three-Eye League or as the boss of a bowling alley in Peoria. . . .

"It is usually contended that even the second-and third-rate reporters of the Golden Age were superior to the best ones of today. Nonsense! The trouble with such fellows is that they have spent so much time listening to old-time romantics and incompetents describe the 'giants' of those days that they have come to believe it. ...

"New York news is not covered adequately. Too few men can deal with the glory, the debauchery and the complexities of that fabulous town. Bennett, Pulitzer, Dana and Greeley had the same complaint."

Flump

"Mrs. Brown Mehard Griffith, of Sewickley. Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh, was found dead yesterday morning at the bottom of an airshaft in the Somerset Hotel, 150 West Forty-seventh Street. Although police investigated the possibility that she might have jumped through the window of her room on the fourth floor, they believed later that she may have fallen over the sill of the airshaft while moving about her room in the early morning. . . ."

Thus ran a routine news item in the New York Times last week. Thus have run countless similar items in every U. S. newspaper. To clear up the doubt which arises every time a person falls-or-jumps unobserved out of a building, two days later the Times made a suggestion on its editorial page. Taking the case of hypothetical Richard Roe, the Times said:

"There is no escape from it within the limits of the present journalistic vocabulary. If the reporter says 'fell,' he may have missed a big society suicide story. If he says 'jumped' he may have the Roe family rising in indignation. One of Lewis Carroll's portmanteau words is clearly demanded. Why not 'flump'?"

Ole Swimmin' Hole

On page 104 of Satevepost appeared an advertisement in behalf of the Cycle Trades of America. "Ride A Bike" the headline urged. To illustrate the joys of boyhood bicycling, a retouched photograph of a shady pond was shown. Disporting themselves in the ole swimmin' hole were three naked little boys. In the right foreground, against a tree, leaned a boy's bicycle. In the left foreground, on the grass, lay a small girl's bicycle.

New in Rio

The English and U. S. colonists in Rio de Janeiro were offered some new reading last week. Fresh on the newsstands was the Brazil Daily Mail, only English language daily in the country, six columns wide, slightly larger than tabloid size. Founder and editor-in-chief is Francis J. Tiertsort, onetime Manhattan journalist who vaguely mentioned when he left New York that he had the backing of "two Belgian jewellers." Brazil Daily Mail's publisher and president is Antenor Novaes, owner of the Brazilian daily A Patria. Publishers doubted if a daily paper in English would do great things in Rio.

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