Flora, Fauna & Tex

The week after Stanley Walker took over the city desk at the New York Herald Tribune in 1928, he promoted a snub-nosed copy boy to his reporting staff. Hefty, 21-year-old John ("Tex") O'Reilly, son of a rancher from Pecos County, had switched from sheepherder to apple-knocker, from milkman to soda jerk. As a newsman he was an unknown quantity, but in one respect the staff agreed that he showed promise: he had just won $167 in the city-room poker game.

His boss, a fellow Texan, soon found that O'Reilly also had a talent for telling the human--and the animal--side of the news. A natural-born naturalist, young Tex haunted the zoos and aquariums, amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of amphibians and reptiles. With a single feature story, he made a celebrity out of Whitey, a rare albino frog at the American Museum of Natural History.

When he reported how a circus leopard chased him into the women's rest room at Madison Square Garden, 600 delighted readers wrote in. An active member of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, O'Reilly was equally at home covering kidnapings or parades.

Costly Camel. O'Reilly was sent to Africa in 1942, told to write feature stones and stay away from the war. The war wouldn't let him: his freighter picked up 18 torpedoed American seamen, and his exclusive story on their 32 days adrift whetted his appetite for more. He joined the Free French forces at Lake Chad, lived with the French Camel Corps, once put on his expense account "one camel, lost in action, $350."

He stuck with the British Eighth Army in defeat and victory, went on to the Sicily and Salerno landings, and (after nearly dying of malaria) to Normandy's Omaha Beach. One of the first U.S. correspondents to enter liberated Paris, he stayed on to run the Trib's Paris bureau.

Last week hardworking, hard-drinking Tex O'Reilly closed his career as a war and foreign correspondent. He gathered his wife, three daughters, French poodle and loaded dice, and prepared to sail for home and his old beat, the flora & fauna of the eastern seaboard. Easily the most popular U.S. correspondent in Paris, Tex found his last week crowded with farewell parties that went on until all hours, after which he was supposed to make sense of Bevin, Bidault and the Marshall "approach." He was looking forward to the U.S.

"I want to open up my farm in Bucks County," said Tex. "I want to write about America again and find out if it's as strange a place as Europeans think."

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