OUT OF THE PAST
Readers of this blog will be aware that I’ve often made reference to its inspiration, the late Dan Parker, sports editor of the New York Daily Mirror from about 1927 until it went out of business in 1964. Dan had a huge following in New York, not only among sports fans but also among people who just appreciated his sense of humor which entered into his writing on subjects of all sorts.
Newspaper columns weren’t collected into books in Dan’s day the way they are today, so to find anything of his to reprint here I’ve had to go to the newspaper files kept on microfilm at the main office of the New York Public Library and try to explore the thousand-or-more reels containing his total output. That sound like mission impossible and probably it is but I’ll keep trying.
Actually by my calculations the entire collection could be kept on 200 reels or less if only one daily edition of each paper containing the column was filmed instead of the multiple editions that were*. Because of these multiples I found myself looking at each column five or even ten times until I had seen all editions of the paper for one day and the film moved on to the next. Why the Daily Mirror found it necessary to put out so many editions each day when most of them didn’t deviate by so much as a hair from the others is beyond me.
The newspaper files are unique in being the most extensive kept anywhere in the world with researchers coming from everywhere to consult them. There are twenty-five microfilm readers on hand for public use, each one of them running constantly in the service of truth-seekers like myself. In the categories of users, though, I would probably only classify as a hobbyist compared to others who are there on serious business. Yesterday, for instance, I had a feeling that I was rubbing shoulders with the CIA.
In my row of machines I found the adjacent ones were in use by two young men casually dressed along with an older man similarly dressed who was examining the Daily Worker on his monitor. The first two were checking out respectively a French newspaper, Le Figaro, and an Italian one, name unknown. Clearly they were interested in some Communist operation of some kind.
Seeing that there’s no longer a Daily Worker being published in America or Britain, it looked like some earlier event was being investigated for reasons unknown to me. That would be normal for Micro Row. Walking about, one will usually notice the kind of screen the neighbors are consulting, but won’t learn any more. The students keep to themselves and don’t converse with their neighbors. Questioning them about their business is clearly out of order. In a mystery novel or a Hitchcock movie though, I would have bribed the librarian to show me what boxes of tape were consulted and what information was entered on the requisitions submitted by the suspects. After that there would be surveillance and finally a car chase leading to the exposure of a gigantic subversive plot to actually put up buildings on the site of the World Trade Center.
Most of Dan’s product of course is not of much use in enabling me to fill up this space while escaping the labor of thinking up ideas for it on my own with no help from anyone. Dan had space to fill too and couldn’t be expected to write a short story or a comic skit every time he tackled the job. Just like every other journalist he had to supply news as well as views to his readers if he wanted to keep them. So his most common offerings were compendiums of minor items of sports news collected under the heading of “Impertinent Questions about Sports Subjects” “The Broadway Bugle” and similar captions.
As stated, I’ve had to wade through a lot of this ephemeral reporting to get to the kind of thing I’m looking for. I remember a ballad from my boyhood about horse players, ending with the refrain “he gave to the racing magnates all he had -- his shirt.” My knowledge of racing was negligible then and now, but good comic verse is always welcome to me. There was a razzle-dazzle account of the antics of Larry McPhail, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers; that stuck with me. There was a famous story of a fistfight between Ernest Hemingway and Hugh Casey, Dodger pitcher, who was a guest along with his teammates at Hemingway’s Finca Vigia villa in Cuba in the days when the Dodgers trained there and the two men decided to see who packed the most punch post-daiquiris.
There was also a column in 1950 where Dan found a sports angle in the battling in the United Nations over the conflicting approaches of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to the outbreak of the Korean War. Dan described the tactics of Jacob Malik, the Russian representative, as a warmup for the next Olympics where he would compete in “putting the veto”, “the heel-and-toe walkout”, “hurling the invective”, and “the running high dudgeon”.
That’s the kind of thing that keeps me digging in the files.
*Since the Mirror was read mainly for its columns, which included Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, and not its news, it would have made sense to do this. But no one thought of it.