O'Malley of the Sun

"Got as far as first year in Wiilkes-Barre High School. Flopped.

"Three years at Notre Dame University, mostly managing football team. Flopped.

"Four years an art student in Philadelphia, devoting most of the time to studies of esthetic anatomy at Trocadero Burlesque Theatre.

"Commercial illustrator in New York for four years, drawing full-length portraits of vacuum cleaners and canned soup.

"Reporter, New York Morning Sun for 14 years, 13 of which were spent in Jack's restaurant.

"Had two plays, The Head of the House and A Certain Party produced on Broadway. Both terrible flops.

"Wrote two books. The War Whirl in Washington and The Swiss Family O'Malley, the entire first editions of which are still on sale. . . .

"Kindly, strikingly handsome, but all things considered, an all-around flop."

That was the obituary that Frank Ward O'Malley wrote for himself long after he became "O'Malley of the Sun," one of Manhattan's truly famed newspaper reporters, old style. He quit the newspaper business in 1919, wrote undistinguished magazine articles, moved to Europe, faded from the limelight. Yet when he died last week at 56 in France, "O'Malley of the Sun" was still news all over the country. Editorials mourned the passing of a Great Reporter. Colyumist F. P. Adams called him "the perfect and utter newspaperman."

Like most of Reporter O'Malley's copy, his mock autobituary is fanciful. Born in Pittston, Pa., he belonged to a family far from obscure. Of his four brothers, all dead. Joseph, John and Austin were physicians. Brother Austin, eight years Professor of English Literature at Notre Dame University, gained fame as a scientist and oculist. Also he was a Latin scholar, conducted voluminous correspondence with Popes Leo XIII and Benedict XV. Brother William was a naval captain. Frank began work as a smalltown newspaper cartoonist in Pennsylvania, quit when a mine foreman whom he had caricatured fell down a shaft and was killed.

Short, slim Frank O'Malley was 31 when, in 1906, the late Editor Selah Merrill ("Boss") Clarke of the Sun hired him as a reporter. New at the profession, O'Malley showed no greenness. His intimates say "he was born sophisticated." Within a few weeks he was roving the streets, a "space man." His first week on space netted him $72.58, princely for that day. Added to a good reporter's alertness to detail were O'Malley's Irish humor and sensitivity to pathos. Combined they made him a master of the human interest story. Also they enabled him to whip out columns of newspaper humor when news was thin. The Sun printed them at prodigious length.

Even without a byline, Sun readers could recognize O'Malley stories. But it was his brothers in the craft who best appreciated how much O'Malley could make of scant material. Essentially he was a newsman's newsman.

Typical were his stories of the fabulous S. S. Wobble. A competing paper had mistaken the code word "wobble" ("cable instructions") for the name of the vessel in a marine mishap and had concocted an elaborate description of the ship. For years after Reporter O'Malley hammered out stories of the strange misadventures of the Wobble, her cargoes of subways and artesian wells, his discovering her one day at anchor in the Hippodrome tank.

Typical was his creation of ''The Duke of Essex Street" out of an obscure East Side criminal lawyer named Joe Levy. Wrote Reporter O'Malley of the Duke on the feast of Passover:

"It was difficult for a time to get the details of the duke's Passover garb owing to the fact that the interior of his Nile green limousine has recently been fitted up with bookshelves, so that the duke can be surrounded with his law library even when motoring to and from his office. . . . Besides Ittchee, the duke's Jap valet & chauffeur, was a large rubber plant . . . the Easter gift of Solomon, Solomon, Solomon. Solomon, Solomon & Solomon, who learned all their law in the office of the duke. . . ."

But Reporter O'Malley was not limited to such "Mr. Dooley'' humor. He was a thoroughgoing newshawk with entree to the underworld as well as to his good friend Theodore Roosevelt out on Long Island. He knew his Broadway thoroughly. He was a copious drinker.

Most famed of O'Malley's human interest stories, familiar to college students of journalism, is his interview with the mother of the murdered policeman, "Happy Gene" Sheehan. Its simplicity and restraint removed it far from the category of "sob stories." It ended with the mother's account of her visit to the police station where her son's body lay:

". . . The policemen all stopped talking when I came in, and then one of them told me it was against the rules to show Gene at that time; but I knew the policeman only thought I'd break down. I promised him I wouldn't carry on, and he took me into a room to let me see Gene. It was Gene."

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