EGD Orphan #1: Alexander Woollcott

Alexander Woollcott (Bettmann Archive)

     The book inspired by this blog, "Every Goddamn Day," has been out for more than three months.  I'm assuming you've all bought a copy by now and if you haven't, well shame on y... whoops, I mean, your admirable restraint has been rewarded, as the University of Chicago Press is now offering it among their bestsellers at 30 percent off in their Great Chicago Book Sale. You can access their catalogue here.  

    "Every Goddamn Day" is a daily history of Chicago, with 366 compact essays keyed to the date. When writing the book, occasionally I'd find a new story for a particular date that would efface something I'd already done. That is, I'd prepare a vignette for a day, then research would cough up another for the same day that I liked more, either because it was inherently more interesting, or better added to the mix of themes in the book. So the original tale got bumped. But I kept the banished stories in a file called "Orphans" thinking I might serve them up here when their dates came around. 

     The tale below, while interesting — how often do radio commentators die on the air? — was only loosely tied to Chicago, and didn't reach the level of Clint Youle, "Mr. Weatherman," perhaps the first television meteorologist, predicting a chance of snow in a windowless WMAQ studio in 1951 while a blizzard howled outside, the episode included in the book for Jan. 23. 

     Looking over the vignette below now, after not reading it for a year or so, I think I would have added an explanation of how the Tribune, at least among those conversing on the program in 1943, was seen as a moral stain and journalistic embarrassment, sort of the way Fox News is viewed by liberals today.

Jan. 23, 1943: Alexander Woollcott said a lot of witty things. It is he, in 1921, who coined the term "ink-stained wretches" to describe "those who turn out books and plays." It is Woollcott, one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table group of clever inebriates, who launched a million refrigerator magnets when he quipped "all the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening." 

     His final remarks are not so much sharp as knotty, a moral question to be untangled. On the CBS "People's Platform" coast-to-coast radio program, Woollcott responds to one of his fellow panelists trying to put some daylight between Hitler and the German people by saying, "Germany was the cause of Hitler just as much as Chicago is responsible for the Chicago Tribune." 
     This is less a defense of Germany and more an indictment of both. The suggestion is made that this is perhaps unfair: there is a chance that Germany at least, may someday return to the realm of decent places. 
     "I think time may do it," allows Woollcott, his last public utterance. Time does indeed do it, to him anyway, and has its revenge. Woollcott suffers a stroke, on air, is hustled out of the studio and dead by midnight, at age 56. The hazards of live broadcast.