Redhead's Return

Some of the best people in Washington braced themselves last week. Raucous, redheaded Colonel Robert Sharon Allen was about to get out of the Army. They remembered him, somewhat apprehensively, as a combative, profane reporter who would as soon punch a news source in the eye as tap him on the shoulder.

When Allen went to war in July 1942, Partner Drew Pearson had given his pal a touching sen-off. "I shall miss Bob," wrote Drew. "But . . . he'll be back handing out brass rings, punching the tickets for rides on the old Merry-Go-Round." Every so often, during the war, Drew would write a letter to Allen--for all the 18,000,000 readers to see. What Pearson did not tell the readers is that when Allen went to war, Pearson offered him what Allen considered so small a share of their column's income that Allen turned it down in a blast of ex-cavalryman's rage.

Without Love. Theirs had been a profitable partnership, with no love lost between the partners. Their breezy, right-from-the-feedbox style sounded cozy--but its creators were as uncooperative as Gilbert & Sullivan. They were notably cool toward each other, worked separate beats, sometimes got together by telephone only once a day.

It paid well. Allen kept a part-time job with J. David Stern's New Dealing Philadelphia Record at $150 a week, but made $50,000 a year from the Merry-Go-Round. He insists that he had to hand big chunks of it to lawyers, since Merry-Go-Round produced almost as many libel suits as scoops.

Bob Allen became General George Patton's G2, lost his right arm last April when he drove into an ambush in Germany. Three days later, when Patton's Army caught up with him, he had taken over the hospital at Gotha, was bossing its German doctors and nurses.

Since he came home in June, Reporter Allen has spent most of his time on a hard-hitting campaign to get better prosthetic devices for amputees. In his spare time he has learned to type 45 words a minute on a left-handed typewriter, had his teeth fixed to soften the rasp in his voice, the better to talk on the radio.

He plans to return to the Record Feb. 1. Said he last week: "I haven't seen or talked to Pearson since I got back."

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