"Guest Day"

Last week Detroit and the State of Michigan turned St. Valentine's Day into "Eddie Guest Day." The occasion roughly commemorated Edgar Albert Guest's 54 years of life, his 40 years in newspaper work, his 25 years of writing popular verse. Seven hundred Detroiters jammed into the Statler Hotel for a testimonial dinner. A troupe of radio actors broadcast dramatized episodes of Rhymester Guest's life. And Motormaker Henry Ford's mouthpiece, William J. Cameron, spoke for thousands of Guest addicts in & out of Michigan when he declared:

"When we were all young reporters, and Eddie started writing poetry, we used to wonder whether Eddie was really a poet. I say to you now that he was and is a poet. If he were not, you and I wouldn't be here now."

"I have wondered what success is," replied beaming Eddie Guest. "This must be it."

Edgar Albert Guest is one of the most valuable newspaper properties in the U. S. His daily "poem" for the Detroit Free Press is syndicated in some 200 U. S. papers. But the monetary return therefrom is probably less valuable to the Free Press than the cachet of having employed Guest all his adult life, a fact of which the paper's promotion department never loses sight.

Eddie Guest was 10 when his parents took him to Detroit from England. His first job was jerking sodas. One of his customers was a Free Press bookkeeper, who helped Eddie get a job marking scores on the Free Press's baseball bulletin board. He was soon copy boy in the editorial rooms, graduated to general reporting, to conducting a weekly column called "Blue Monday." After a while, the column became a daily Free Press feature, and Guest the wonder of the staff for the ease with which he metamorphosed everyday trifles into folksy copy. When the Guests put their oleander out in the spring, it was duly recorded. It made the column again when they brought it in in the autumn. The children (Eddie Jr. & Janet), Mrs. Guest's pickles, a friend's fancy vest, were all grist for the rhymester's mill.

By 1916, Guest was syndicated nationally. By last week he himself could not recall how many volumes of verse he had composed, guessed that his entire output numbered about 10,000 rhymes. A 937-page Collected Verse informs inquirers as to Eddie Guest's position on everything from diet to Deuteronomy. Examples:

Home

It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home. . . .

Mother

. . . an' the richest man to the poorest

Waif right under the skin is brother

when they stand an' sigh, with a tear-

dimmed eye, at a thought of the dear old mother.

Home Cooking

. . . . I dine on rare and costly fare

whene'er good fortune lets me,

but there's no meal that can compare

with those the missus gets me.

It has been a long time since "the missus" has had to get Mr. Guest his meals. The Guests have a fine big house just off the Detroit Golf Club's fairway, a summer home at Pointe Aux Barques, Mich. In addition to his syndicate work, Rhymester Guest has for the past four years boarded a sleeper every Monday night, awakened in Chicago next morning to broadcast verse and chit-chat for Household Finance Corp. Last October he, his wife and daughter went to Hollywood where he was to make three homespun pictures for Universal. He waited around three months while the company tried to whip together a story suitable to it and him. Meantime, Universal was not only Daying Guest's salary but $1,200 a week toll charges so that he could broadcast from his Chicago outlet. "My parents always told me it was impossible to get something for nothing," he wrote his son, a Free Press reporter. "It's hard for me to admit they were wrong." After Christmas Poet Guest returned to Detroit to end 'this senseless waste of money." Free Press workers make a big thing of Eddie Guest's camaraderie and intimacy with the staff. He still has a desk in the office and, according to office gossip, will probably run the paper some day when aging Owner Edward Douglas Stair retires, His own success still bewilders him a little. Modestly says he: "I do the same kind of jingles that James Whitcomb Riley used o write. ... All he tried to do was to be sincere. . . . The only thing I contributed was a little time which I gambled when I came home from the job of reporting and drove myself to the typewritert o do some writing for myself."

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