Flash Powder to Portable

He handles a typewriter about as clumsily as the average reporter would handle a Speed Graphic camera. But Francis Michael ("Slim") Lynch makes good pictures with either machine. A year ago, the Washington State Press Club gave old-time Photographer Lynch a prize (for a picture of a murderer's wife tearfully comforting the victim's mother). Last week Slim Lynch, who has now put his camera aside, got another Press Club award--this time, for the best-written feature story in any newspaper in the state.

Hulking, tough-talking Slim (for what he used to be) Lynch, 47, has found his new job no soft touch: "Jeez, I got so I could take the pictures they sent me out on with my eyes closed. This, brother, is different. Writing is damn hard work."

Back from World War I as a frail youth with a bad lung, Lynch slept through a spare-time course at the University of Washington journalism school. The first term, he says, all he learned was to double-space his copy. After six months of it, his news-writing instructor called him aside and said: "Mr. Lynch, you are wasting your time here. Your English is horrible. Your only possibility is as a sports writer."

So Lynch became a hard-drinking news photographer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the acrid era of flash powder, singed eyelashes and burning lace curtains. "You could always tell a photographer," he recalls. "One hand would be bound in picric acid gauze, and his eyebrows would be burned off." You could tell Slim Lynch by a shapeless cap, a tired-looking overcoat, a cynical stare. He sharpened his camera eye on such famed stories as the Weyerhaeuser kidnaping--and hardened his stomach on raids on rural stills (the newsmen usually split the "take" with the dry squad). He got to know practically every cop, private eye, drunk, lawyer, convict and whore in the Pacific Northwest.

Strike & Out. In 1936 Lynch was fired for Newspaper Guild activity, became a martyr in the Guild's first big strike. It ended after 15 weeks, when Hearst hired John Boettiger as publisher of the P.L, and Boettiger later rehired Lynch. But as the years went by, Slim grew tired of shooting pictures of "broads sitting on the edge of a table." He also got tired of going out on stories with bright young reporters, "all excited and running around like mad." He had forgotten more angles than they would ever learn.

Last year, after the Boettigers had gone, astute Managing Editor Ed Stone found a way to rescue Lynch from boredom and make it pay. Slim had never written much of anything, but he knew everybody in town, and knew how to spin a yarn. Stone set him to writing a Tuesday-through-Friday local column. It turned out to be a wise and whimsical journal about the odd corners of Seattle life, with tales of seamy Skidroad characters, the scavengers on the city dumps and such old Seattle landmarks as the once-grand Globe Hotel. Seattle took the new columnist to its heart. His prizewinning column was typical: a half-bitter, half-sentimental piece about Memorial Day in Victory Square, where a wooden imitation of the Washington Monument lists King County's 1,300 war dead. The Square's "eternal" gas flame had gone out. "Eternity," he wrote, "wasn't so awfully long, was it?"

Not so dumb nor so gruff as he acts, Slim Lynch, like many an oldtime newsman, finds it amusing to pretend he is semiliterate. Says he: "People always embarrass me when they talk about style. I don't know how to start a story or end it. I just put down simple words and I write about simple things. I use my feet and get around and talk to a lot of people."

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