Kieran & Co.

A family to be reckoned with are the seven smart Kierans of Manhattan, sons & daughters of the late loved Dr. James Michael Kieran, president of Manhattan's Hunter College for women. The Kierans include:

> Helen Kieran Reilly, who writes good murder mysteries (McKee of Centre Street, Man with the Painted Head).

> Jim, 14 years a New York Timesman, who launched the phrase "brains trust," helped found the American Newspaper Guild, is now secretary to Mayor LaGuardia.

> Leo, a Timesman who-looks like a character from The Front Page, has been a speed skater, cyclist, jockey, milkwagon driver, chemist, mathematician, perfume manufacturer and aviator.

> Larry, the youngest, a legal aide to the Manhattan surrogates, and his two other married sisters, Kitty and Mary.

But the keenest Kieran of all is the New York Times's, John Francis, considered by many the best-equipped sports philosopher since William Hazlitt (1778-1830), known to many more as the least stumpable question-answerer on Canada Dry's Information Please program.

John Kieran is short, wiry, grey, bristly and brilliant. Daily in his sport column he reports ball players speaking with the tongues of savants, quotes Latin, law, manages to be humorist, poet and picker of winners. John's radio foray revealed him further as a Shakespeare scholar, an expert on birds and nature, a walking record book on sports, the most dependable know-it-all of Information Pleased omniscient pack.

John Kieran's bird hobby goes back to 1912 when he was a protege of a bearded bird-lover named S. Harmsted Chubb, who used to take him for walks in the old wooded family neighborhood just north of Manhattan Island. First practical application of the ornithology John learned came that fall when he ran a chicken farm as a sideline to his first job after graduation from Fordham. He was a school teacher at $10 a week in a two-pupil rural New York school where Brother Leo janitored for $5 a year. At home in the long evenings he read Blackstone and the Bard. In 1915 he left his two pupils for the Times, pieced out a cub's salary with the slightly ornithological sideline of running the Central Park swanboat concession. When he went to War his father, then dean of Hunter, supervised John's boat stands. After the War John returned to the Times, married his favorite office telephone girl.

Now they have three youngsters, all bird-lovers and naturalists like dad, all until two years ago fully convinced of dad's infallibility. But then, when redheaded, tubby, smart John Francis Jr., 15, was sports editor of Barnard School's paper, John Sr. called a big one wrong. If Schmeling beat Joe Louis he promised to eat his hat. John ate a hat all right--a candy and cake creation. John Jr. lost no such wager, but dad's wrong guess was a blow. He said, "Did I lose prestige!"

Last week Red, now a Yale freshman, set out to get prestige of his own by stumping Dad on an Information Please question. With millions of radio listeners tuning in, one smart Kieran asked another to give the first line of three poems. Father John muffed Shakespeare's Silvia completely, identified The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (but gummed up the first line), had trouble getting the curfew before the knell in Gray's Elegy. Mused Father John into the microphone in Kieranized Shakespeare : "How sharper than a thankless tooth it is to have a serpent child."

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