The ep42 Writers And Pals

This is Jimmy Powers and Happy to Becoming Your Way with another Grantland RISE story. There, this is Jimmy Powers transcribed. Today, Granny Rice tells about writers and pals, and exactly as he wrote it for the tumult

and the shouting, I'll narrate it in first person. I believe that I came along in gay or happier times for both newspaper readers and writers. Somewhere in the late 1920s, there was a sudden change.

In those earlier days, colonists wrote verse and paragraphs. There was Franklin P. Adams of the Mail and Harold Tribune, whose two columns, always in good humor and the Conning Tower, were magnificent. Bert Leston Taylor, BLT, who conducted the Line of Type I and II in the Chicago Tribune, was equally wonderful.

These were the two stars, but there were many others who were excellent. Frank Al Stanton, the serious poet in the Atlanta Constitution, was in front of them all. Others were Judd Mortimer Lewis in the Houston Post, John D. Wells in the Buffalo News, Don Marquis of the Old Sun, whose Archie the Cockroach and other superb verse held high attention.

Also, Eddie Guest and Henry Cidnor Harrison from Virginia. These and some others rule those days of column readers. They suddenly gave way to Westbrook, Peggler, Haywood, Bruin, Alexander Wilcott, Ralph McGill, Walter Lippman, Frank Kent, E.V. Dirling, John O'Donnell, Bob Considine, and many more.

Certainly Frank Adams, Bert Taylor, and Don Marquis had an appeal that could equal out of any columnist of the present era with perhaps the exception of Westbrook, Peggler. Peggler's fiery diatribes kept you wondering what he would say or whose scalp he would lift.

Nevertheless, I got a far greater thrill in reading Adams, Taylor, or Marquis and other years than I have got since. Maybe it was because I was a graduate of the Versen Paragraph School from the days of the Nashville, Tennessee.