In Search of Legend

"The last time I was in New York," wrote Stanley Walker to a friend, "I got the idea that, if we except a few aged but loyal pals, nobody gave a hoot about my presence in the city--indeed, that it would help congestion a little if I went away." These words were doubly bitter, for they came from a man who saw himself as a symbol of the excitement and vicarious glamour of newspapering in New York.

A slight, hawk-nosed and caustic immigrant from Texas ranch country, Walker got to the big city for the first time in 1919. Short on experience, but well-stocked with self-confidence, he took just half an hour to talk himself into a job on the New York Herald (now the Herald Tribune). By 1928, he was city editor. And for seven loud years, he steered the newsroom through a stirring and gaudy time. Speakeasies flourished. Lindbergh had just hopped the Atlantic; Babe Ruth had just hit 60 home runs. J. Pierpont Morgan posed for photographers with a lady midget in his lap. Resting peacefully in his room at the Park Central Hotel, Manhattan Gambler Arnold Rothstein was dispatched by a murderer's bullet.

Two Commandments. Walker not only relished his work as a recorder of such legends, but he set out to become a legend himself. He did not so much fill the role of city editor as play it. With favored Trib hands, he spent idle hours playing the match game next door at Bleeck's, which in those days was noted for its good Dutch food and Gemuetlichkeit. When his reporters came back to report failure on an assignment, he wordlessly drew from his desk drawer a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker cap, bulldog pipe and magnifying glass, and snooped around the floor on his knees, as if searching for a lost trail. To an upstate Tribune correspondent whose copy stood in sore need of punctuation, Walker sent a full page of commas. His ways were not without their effect.

"I probably--hell undoubtedly--raised, trained and encouraged more young newspapermen and writing people than any person now living," he wrote last year, in a reflective mood. If this was overstatement, none of his contemporaries bothered to correct it.

He cast all his pronunciamentos in language carefully calculated to endure. As if to make sure that they did, he published most of them in his book City Editor. "Pick adjectives,'' he said, "as you would pick a diamond or a mistress." He defined the newsroom as "part seminary, part abattoir," divided all sportswriters into two schools: "Gee Whiz!" and "Aw Nuts!" Freud was "that Daniel Boone of the canebrakes of the libido," New York's fiery Mayor La Guardia a man who would "bite in the clinches," the reading public a "drowsy, dangerous dinosaur." For working journalists, he boiled the Ten Commandments to two: "Do not betray a confidence, and do not knife a comrade."

The Fish Hook. No newsman, he seemed certain, would ever know such high old times again. He paid his own respects to the times by putting together The Night Club Era, a book that sorrowed over the boozy glamour of "the good old days" in New York, and Mrs. Astor's Horse, a hard-eyed appreciation of the city's cafe society.

But his own legend eluded him, and he left the Tribune to pursue it on other publications, even venturing as far west as Philadelphia. In eight months there, as editor of the Evening Public Ledger (now defunct), he found nothing of value, he said, but an all-night delicatessen. He went back to the homestead in Lampasas County, Texas. There, on 300 acres renamed Black Sheep Retreat, he farmed, designed a pigsty, wrote many articles and more books. For a visitor, he scribbled a hasty creed: "Clean copy. Hard work. Better to know the truth than not. Avoid dullness. Young newspapermen are the best people on earth."

Fortnight ago, in a Houston hospital, Walker, 64, was told that the "fish hook" that burned in his throat was cancer. Facing surgery to remove his larynx, and chilled by the shadows he saw, he made his choice. He phoned an aged and loyal pal in New York. "Get my obituary ready." he said. Next morning, his wife Ruth, returning from an errand, saw him on the porch of the cabin where he kept his books and his shotgun. Would he like a lift to the main house? "No," said Stanley Walker. "You come back a little later." When he was alone, he put the muzzle of the shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

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