Sweetness & Light

Manhattan newspaper offices for the last three weeks have buzzed about a Hearst "raid" on feature writers of the Scripps-Howard World-Telegram. Over to Hearst went Fashion Writer Prunella Wood and Shopping Colyumist Alice Hughes. Last week it became known that Heywood Broun had received a Hearst offer, turned it down. Even if Colyumist Broun had lumbered away from the World-Telegram Publisher Roy Howard would have had good reason to feel pleased with the results of last week's deals in colyumists. He had conducted a quiet but more effective raid of his own: Westbrook Pegler, famed colyumist for the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, whose "Speaking Out" has contained some of the most pungent wit as well as some of the best critical sports reporting in the U. S. for the last eight years, will start writing for the Scripps-Howard United Feature Syndicate two months hence.

Sports page readers began to be acquainted with Colyumist Pegler's acid commentaries shortly after the War. Before that he had started in Chicago as a United Press reporter in 1912, gone abroad in 1916 to become the U. P.'s star War correspondent until he enlisted in the Navy in 1918. The United Press handled his sports column until 1925, when he joined the Chicago Tribune Syndicate.

For his return to U. P.'s United Feature Syndicate, there were several reasons be sides a substantial increase in pay over the $23,000 a year that had made him one of the best paid U. S. sports writers. The terms of Pegler's contract with the Tribune forbade his writing for any other publication. He was usually confined to the subject of sport and even when, as last winter, he wrote sardonic essays on goings on in Washington, they appeared on sports pages. For the World-Telegram, Colyumist Pegler will write about anything he likes or. much more probably, dislikes. His work will appear, like Broun's, on the feature page.

As a writer, Pegler's chief merit is an attentive, saturnine realism. The first paragraph of his piece before last week's most widely publicized prizefight: "Jack Sharkey, the prizefighter who took up failure as a vocation in life and made a brilliant success of it, is fighting his old friend Tommy Loughran in Philadelphia tonight. There is a contest in which it ought to be possible to stir up the widest disinterest!

After the fight, Pegler described what had caused most of his confreres to compose routine sobstories:

''Well, it was sad, in a sad, sentimental sort of way, to peer up through the ropes of the scaffold and compare the Loughran and the Sharkey of that moment with, the boys as we knew them when Loughran used to be called the pretty one, He started fighting at the age of 15, which was 16 years ago, an uncommonly handsome, upstanding kid with the poise of a statue and nice teeth and hard, flat belly with the muscles laid over one another like the sections of an armadillo's shell.

"Now there were not many teeth left in his mouth. His lips had been punched wide. There was an old scar, almost as bold as a knife wound, on his left cheekbone. And over his eyes the accumulation of scar tissue, where his brows had been opened and stitched and healed repeatedly, projected like eaves. His belly was still rather flat, but it flapped and fluttered like a loose drumhead and there was a band of slack-meat over the top of his trunks." The piece ended with what none of Pegler's readers could misconstrue as an apology for sentiment: "But I am bracing up now. I will be all right in a minute. I guess I am just an old crybaby. But a fellow was saying I couldn't turn it on and couldn't write anything but cynicism, and I said the hell I couldn't."

Because professional sport lives on publicity, sporting personages rarely incur the enmity of the Press with libel suits. This may have aided more than one sports writer like the late Ring Lardner, Joe Williams, William McGeehan and Paul Gallico (who will replace Pegler on the Chicago Tribune Syndicate) to perfect sarcastic styles. It is unlikely that a wider field will decrease Pegler's eloquence or his impatience. He plans to-call his new column "Sweetness and Light."

Until three years ago, when the New York Evening Post began to print his work, Westbrook Pegler was better known in Chicago than in the East. Since 1920 he has lived at Pound Ridge, Conn. Possibly because most of his neighbors have remodeled Colonial farmhouses, Pegler's is an adaptation of a Bavarian chalet. Slight, wiry, sandy-haired, he plays atrocious golf, drives his car like the coal man. Before their marriage his attractive wife was Julia Harpman, star crime reporter on the New York Daily News. His father, Arthur Pegler, is still the New York Daily Mirror's ablest rewrite man.

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