From West of the Tracks

At a war-bond rally in the Loop last week hundreds of readers of the Chicago Daily News met two of their favorite newspaper characters. They were there in person: 1) "Oxie O'Rourke," a baggy-pants commentator off West Madison Street who speaks the unimportant man's view of important matters in a side-of-the-mouth argot; 2) fat-chinned Clem Lane, a near-legendary Chicago newspaper man. The two are one & the same.

Seriocomic "Oxie O'Rourke" has lately been taking on more importance than ever in the Daily News (circ. 440,000). Once he was merely a sidelines character, along with his straight man, "Torchnose McGonigle," in Clem Lane's stories of Chicago crime and political shenanigans. Now Clement Quirk Lane has become City Editor, and the Daily News has been ballyhooing him as a Finley Peter Dunne, finding with more ease than accuracy a parallel in Oxie and Torchnose to Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" and "Mr. Hennessy."

In recent weeks Oxie has had his ungrammatical go at a variety of subjects, from "stratosphere strategy" to Presidential press conferences, with a fine disregard for the official position of the Daily News's publisher, Navy Secretary W. Franklin Knox.

Oxie and Lane have been sent out on tour, to New York and Washington. A sample of Oxie's style and philosophy: "Congress is bending an ear to the farmers, to the unions, to the veterans, to the big shots, to this bloc and that group. I wish some time somebody would rise up in the House and holler ... a kind word for the miscellaneous lugs like Oxie O'Rourke. . . . But I'm afraid the other lobbyists would gang up on us, claiming we was un-American."

He Is Never Scooped. White-thatched Clem Lane has been doing Oxie pieces for about six years. Oxie came into being when Mayor Edward J. Kelly (ever since a target of Oxie's meat ax) was trying to legalize Chicago's large population of bookmakers. The Daily News editorialized against it, and Lane, who knew his way around the handbooks, invented Oxie as a wiseacring mouthpiece.

Close by the Daily News building was Louie's saloon, where a bookie named Moxie shined a well-tailored elbow on the bar. He met Lane next day: "Who's this guy Oxie? The cops'll be thinking he's me." Lane fumbled only an instant: "You don't know Oxie? Why that's Oxie O'Rourke, down the street." Thus Oxie got a last name.

To Lane, Oxie is "the perfect answer for a newspaperman; he can't be scooped because he knows everything. He is the voice of the people west of the tracks."

West of the tracks, near the sprawling stockyards, is where Clem Lane was born 46 years ago, and much of Oxie's slangy. slipshod idiom springs from Lane's playmates and his long acquaintance with Chicago's Irish cops.

Unferocious. During Prohibition, Lane became the Daily News gangster specialist. He was creating an Oxie technique then. He snickered at the gangsters by inventing unferocious nicknames for them: "Greasy Thumb" Gusik, "Loudmouth" Levine, "Violet" Fusco. (Fusco's pals thereafter sent him bunches of violets.)

City Editor Lane calls Oxie his dream man. His staff looks on Lane as a dream city editor, who came up the hard way. Unhurried, taciturn (but capable of awesome anger), he often takes on police rewrites between detailing assignments, bats out an Oxie between editions. Some of the staff's oldsters remark that since he quit drinking and became an active churchman Clem Lane has taken on a somewhat pontifical mien. The opposite is apparent in "Oxie O'Rourke."

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