Casey Comes Home

The staff of the Chicago Daily News took time out one night last week for an impressive collective binge to honor a newshawk come home to roost after 22 months on the battlefronts of World War II. Recipient of this kudos was red-faced, balding Robert Joseph Casey, quick of mind and ample of girth, who has been a fair-haired Newsboy since 1920. His standing on the News is such that when his boss, Colonel Frank Knox, congratulated him on a series about the war, he amiably remarked: "I'm glad you like them because they cost you about $600 apiece."

Correspondent Casey has seen this war in all its peculiar phases and helped mightily in making the News foreign coverage the best in the U.S. During the days of the Bore War he waddled in a taxicab through the Siegfried Line, spent many a pleasant afternoon on a terrace in Luxemburg dreaming up antics for a French flier he referred to as "Albert le Screwball." He fled before the Nazis in France, was in London during the worst bombardments. The wheeze of his laughter was never stilled whether he was jaunting in Ireland, following the British in North Africa and Ethiopia, or covering a sea battle in the Mediterranean. He decided it was time to come home when his leg was crushed after a mob of excited Egyptians in Cairo pushed him from a train during an air raid.

A Casey dictum, and there are many, is that "only people with poor equipment or foresight have adventures." On that principle, he usually makes use of all kinds of bleak understatements in his reports to his home office. One of them from London read: "Hotel just blown out from under me. Filing tomorrow. Regards." For maladroit London censors, Casey was a baffling problem. Effective was his ironic report of an air raid in which he reduced censorship to complete inanity by refusing to mention even the name of the country bombed.

Casey's dispatches are a strange combination of spot news, fantasy and feature material. "When you've got two details for a story," he says, "why look for a third?" That theory, which would probably lead a less able man to the doghouse, has always worked fine for him.

Casey joined the Field Artillery after the entry of the U.S. into World War I. He was thrice cited for bravery under fire, came out a bemedaled captain. His journal of that war, The Cannoneers Have Hairy Ears, was the third of some 20 books he has to his credit. His experience in the artillery came in handy when he was in Cuba in 1933 covering the revolution. When Cubans outside the National Hotel kept missing the establishment, Casey took over, scored a bull's-eye on his first shot.

Wars are not the only things that have sent Casey abroad. He once traveled 33,500 miles through two hurricanes and four full gales to bring back 20,000 feet of motion-picture film showing the stone idols of a vanished race on Easter Island.

Casey's relations with the News have been cordial, except for a bit of trouble some years ago when he was asked to cover an Illinois wolf hunt on an expense account of $10. His itemized list included such expenditures as: "To rent car Chicago to Springfield,1-c-; gas for same, 1-c-; oil for same, 5-c- (it was an oil eater); to rent horse, 1-c-; hay, 5 mills; to rent glasses to look at wolf, 1-c-." After worrying the subject for a while, Casey discovered he had spent only $9.90. He polished off the matter by adding: "Wolfbane: 10-c-." To remind the accounting department of the terrible time it had with that itemized record, he continues to record Wolfbane as a necessary expense.

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