Good, Clean Sport

Four neatly dressed real-estate men gingerly picked their way through the dusty, bustling city room of Hearst's Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Off in a corner they found their man, a Hearstling whose byline outdraws Pegler, Pearson and Eleanor Roosevelt in the far Northwest, and next to Blondie is the PI's most avidly read feature. One of the callers made a little speech, and Sports Editor Royal Brougham learned that he, of all people, was Seattle's "first citizen" of 1946.

Not his corned-up flights of prose, which his readers like, but a long list of good works had won small, brassy-voiced Royal Brougham the bronze plaque which usually goes to the city's biggest industrialists, philanthropists, and men-about-culture. Brougham had fought long, loudly and effectively for bigger & better playgrounds as "living memorials" to the dead of World War II, "instead of statues of some guy sitting on an iron horse." His wartime promotions had raised $250,000 for servicemen's recreation.

Clean Liver. At 52, Seattle's first citizen neither looks nor lives like most of the sportswriting clan. To them he is a queer, aloof fish who never works in shirtsleeves, never smokes, drinks or swears. But he goes with the boys who do, and sometimes, on out-of-town trips, writes their stuff for them when they get plastered. Six days a week he eyes the sports field once over lightly, knocks out a chatty, chummy column called the Morning After. At the small Dunlap Baptist Church, in a rundown part of town, Brougham teaches a Sunday school class of 35 teenagers. They come partly for the Bible lessons, partly to meet the guest stars their teacher hauls in from the sports world.

Brougham started on the P-I as a $6-a-week "copy boy in knee pants, worked up to sports editor by 1919; six years later a Hearst troubleshooter arrived in town, fired the managing editor, gave Brougham the job.

Forgotten Man. "At first it wasn't so bad'" says Brougham, "because Hearst forgot he had a Seattle paper. I threw his editorials on the floor and ran local stuff. . . ." In 1929 Hearst remembered, and Brougham went back to sports--but at a bigger salary than his successor got as M.E.

--Today, as a Hearst drawing card and a radio chatterer on the side, he earns $12,000 a year. He has traveled 350,000 miles to cover sports events. He has bombarded crooked sports promoters with thousands of yards of angry copy. His staffers resent the way he picks their brains for squibs for his column, taking their brightest gossip, but they have to admire the way the boss's column pulls in the fan mail.

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