"Bee-oftheP-D

In the first week of spring, Francis Albert Behymer went out to look for news, and put a thousand muddy miles behind him. At little towns like Martin, Tenn., and Benton, Ark., the wiry 76-year-old stopped his plodding Chevrolet and got out to visit with the villagers. He talked their language, quoted their Bible, knew their crops and brought news to them from neighboring towns. In his notes and in his uncertain camera, he imprisoned a homely record that dealt with horses, people, auctions, and little girls who raise rabbits. When he had enough of a haul, he headed home to St. Louis and his desk at Joseph Pulitzer's Post-Dispatch.

To people who read his rambling columns, "Bee" Behymer is as durable a Midwest institution as his paper, which is only 67. He has written for the Post-Dispatch since 1888, when the late City Editor Charles E. Chapin (who ended up at Sing Sing for killing his wife) took him on as/correspondent at Belleville, Ill.

One stormy night Bee was assigned to cover a bicycle race, and his packet of "Belleville Notes" missed the train to St. Louis. Chapin gave his cub correspondent a screaming tongue-lashing over the telephone. The quaking Behymer hired a rig, drove 14 miles to put the column of trivia on Chapin's desk. He got no thanks, and Chapin growled when he okayed Bee's expense account for $3 for the horse & rig, but his job was saved. He still thinks Chapin was a great man, "but very unscrupulous. He made a newspaperman out of me by keeping me scared all the time."

Behymer covered his share of murders and lynchings, put in what he regards as several dull stretches as assistant city editor, spent one happy period writing a Sunday feature page called the "True Life Section," where the P-D ran "scrupulously true stories about people and their lives." He still writes that kind of story, but the section was killed long ago by the. late Managing Editor 0. K. Bovard. Said O.K.B.: "Too many cornfield murders."

A love for cornfield journalism, gruesome and otherwise, kept mild Bee Behymer from ever graduating from the Post-Dispatch, while generations of St. Louis newspapermen he knew (Westbrook Pegler, Theodore Dreiser, Silas Bent, Herbert Bayard Swope, et al.) came & went. A little (125 Ibs.) man with unruly grey hair, a too-big nose and a small mustache, he is proud that he never had to take a drink or buy one to get a story. As a solid senior citizen of Lebanon, Ill., he sings a raspy bass in the Methodist choir, is a trustee of small McKendree College, writes editorials for his son's Webster Groves News-Times. He always carries a beat-up briefcase that holds his evening paper, his notes, a set of brushes.

Every spring Bee pores over country weeklies for ideas, peers at a big office map through his steel-rimmed bifocals, and plots out a trip. Of his style of writing, which is more like country weekly stuff than P-D prose, he said last week: "I throw conventionalism and standardization to the winds and write by ear. I let my wife read it, if possible, and we always compromise and make the changes she suggests."

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