Blue Bloomers & Burning Bodies

"They led Ruth Brown Snyder from her steel cage tonight. Then the powerful guards thrust her irrevocably into the obscene, sprawling oak arms of the ugly electric chair . . . The body that once throbbed with the joy of her sordid bacchanals turned brick red as the current struck . . . That was only 30 minutes ago. The memory of the crazed woman in her last agony as she struggled against the unholy embrace of the chair is yet too harrowing . . . She wore blue bloomers . . ." In such flamboyant journalese, flamboyant Hearstling Gene Fowler described the executions of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray for the murder of her husband, in the old New York American. Fowler's story was republished last week in Star Reporters (Random House; $3), an anthology of 34 newspaper stories selected by Hearstling Ward Greene. Editor Greene polled 100 newsmen, then ignored most of their 1,000 nominations in favor of his own choices. Among them: three executions, three trials, three funerals, two lynchings, a flood, a fire, a torpedoing.

Nevertheless, many of the stories are notable simply because, in detailing murder and sudden death, they also give pictures--more vivid than history books, more penetrating-than novels--of their times.

Tears & Tipoffs. Some of the star reports have not worn well. Reporter Henry Morton Stanley greets Explorer David Livingstone (1871) with his famed question and then, like any cub, confesses that he forgot everything else that was said or happened. Charlie Mitchell battles John L. Sullivan to bare-knuckled exhaustion in 39 rounds in France, but wide-eyed young Arthur Brisbane at the ringside (1888) spends many words on the picturesque surroundings and oddities of the French.

Other stories still make exciting reading. Richard Harding Davis gives a clean, dramatic report of a Cuban revolutionist's gallant death before a firing squad (1897) and leaves him "asleep in the wet grass, with his motionless arms still tightly bound behind him, with the scapular twisted awry across his face, and the blood from his breast sinking into the soil he had tried to free." Winifred Black, the original sob sister, sets the pattern for countless future sob sister leads with "I begged, cajoled and cried my way through the line of soldiers" to get into Galveston after the flood (1900). Then she compresses the harrowing scene into six words: "We've burned over 1,000 people today."

John Reed, who later became a Soviet saint, rides on a raid with Pancho Villa (1914) and turns in a story that is half good fast Western, half a discussion of human liberty. In the same manner, H. L. Mencken ignores most of the who, what & when of the courtroom testimony in the Scopes evolution trial (1925) and tells the why of the trial in the mores of the backward, superstition-ridden hill folks.

Only once is there a mention in the book of the sweat that most reporters distill trying to find words to fit their big news. Charles A. Lindbergh handed a scoop and a Pulitzer prize to old friend Lauren ("Deac") Lyman of the New York Times when he sailed into exile (1935) after his baby was kidnaped. All afternoon, Lyman sweated over 13 different leads before, in desperation, he settled on a routine Times lead, such as he had written a thousand times.

The lead in which Jack Lait told of the death of John Dillinger (1934) is a classic of tight, tough reporting to the tabloid taste: "John Dillinger, ace bad man of the world, got his last night--two slugs through his heart and one through his head. He was tough and he was shrewd, but he wasn't as tough or as shrewd as the federals . . . Their strength came out of his weakness--a woman."

Longs & Shorts. In his preface, Editor Greene complains that newspaper stories were better in the old days--before the era of rewrite men, fast-breaking editions, Hollywood competition for talent, and the "cult of the camera." Star Reporters almost succeeds in proving his case--but Greene has loaded the dice. He omits such modern byliners as Meyer Berger, Drew Middleton, Leland Stowe and Ernest Hemingway. And Greene's definition of great reporting leans heavily to murder and crime, now far down on the scale of news interest. The big stories now are far more complex, far harder to report. Most newsmen may well conclude that the star reporters of the past were good--but some of the star reporters today are better.

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