Self-Made Correspondent

Most of the 50,000 U.S. newsmen drudge along in their 40-hour-a-week (usually) jobs, pushing pencils, punching typewriters, interviewing small fry, reporting the drab doings of civic characters. Tom Treanor was one such unglamorous unfortunate. But last week Tom Treanor was in Chungking.

Tom Treanor is a columnist-correspondent, of the same general school as Ernie Pyle (TIME, May 31). His cozy, comfortable, popular column, paradoxically called The Home Front, appears daily in the Los Angeles Times.

His airmailed articles (to save cable tolls) are angled for publication six weeks after writing. They are bright vignettes--a picture of the five Italian bootleggers who supply the U.S. Army in Ethiopia; American soldiers borrowing the instruments of a Calcutta dance band and giving Calcuttans a taste of boogie-woogie.

Tall, handsome Thomas Stanly Treanor is 35 years old, with a mop of jet-black hair and a shy face. He started out in routine fashion, reporting for Hearst papers in Los Angeles (his home). Later he joined the Los Angeles Times as woman's-page editor, in 1940 got his Home Front column to write.

In April 1942, he was on a tour of defense plants, when he decided to be a war correspondent. He wired the Times, asked if it would pay his daily living expenses if he could get a free bomber ride to the Middle East. The Times wired him $1,500 and its blessing. Treanor invested $1,250 in a Pan American Airways ticket, arrived in Cairo as Nazi Marshal Rommel approached Alexandria.

No Insignia. The British refused to accredit him. His claim that he was the only correspondent from a paper west of the Mississippi failed to impress them. Why, they said, we've got plenty of correspondents from west of the Mississippi -- five from Chicago, for instance. Tom Treanor was not permitted to go near the front.

He went anyway. For 70-c- he bought a pair of correspondents' shoulder insignia. He borrowed a British military truck, got to the lines, got back to Cairo before the British Public Relations Officers knew he was gone. He sent letters to the Times telling all. The British stripped him of his illegal insignia.

Then he nosed around a rear R.A.F. base, finally wangled a free bomber ride to Malta, then to Gibraltar. On the way back to Egypt, he saw the bombing of Navarino Bay. The British P.R.O.s were furious, forbade him to ride in combat planes.

No Trouble. Undaunted, Correspond ent Treanor sidled up to some New Zealanders, was taken along into the Battle of El Alamein. Treanor went with them into enemy gunfire, saw five days of the battle before the British discovered him. This time they complained to the U.S. Army. Treanor was ordered by his paper to leave the Near East, fast. The first plane out was one bound for India. Treanor hopped it.

In India, he was finally accredited. He saw jungle fighting, in his spare time interviewed maharajas. He went along when U.S. bombers plastered Rangoon, finally went across the Himalayas into China.

As far as the Times is concerned, he can go on being a foreign correspondent forever. Probably no paper ever got war coverage as cheaply. Paid an estimated $125 a week, Treanor gets along on $10 a day expense money, even in expensive Cairo, where it costs most correspondents three times as much.

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