Scoopmaster

Chicagoans popped their eyes and bought copies of Hearst's Her aid-American like small boys going after hot cakes. What attracted their nose for sensational "news" was a running story compounded of such sure-fire elements as a "suitcase baby" and a vanished blonde. It promised "clues and discoveries and cruel twists of fate in Millard Bender's 50,000-mile, $25,000, seven-month search for his loved ones. . . ."

To make way for it, Hearst's hustlebustle evening Herald-American last week dumped a "goofball" (sleeping pill) expose it had been running for weeks. As the new series developed, opposition editors sighed; baby-faced Harry Reutlinger, city editor of the Herald-American, was turning his journalistic cartwheels again. They had given up hoping he would fall on his face; but they still marveled at the razzle-dazzle that has pushed his paper (circ. 562,000) out in front of the competing Times and Jack Knight's Daily News.

Bell-Ringer. One of the best city editors in the business, Reutlinger has clung to his spot for a dozen years, while a dozen managing editors have come & gone. (His standard, deadpan approach to a new Hearst-appointed managing editor: "If you don't want me to work for you, just let me know and I'll make other arrangements." He never has to.) Hearst accountants may wince at the long-distance tolls he runs up, but he rings up scoops that way. By casual telephone calls, he got beats on the Dionne quintuplets' birth (it came over the wires as a one-paragraph item; he telephoned Dr. Dafoe for the details), and Douglas Corrijan's wrong-way flight (Reutlinger placed phone calls to three airports in Ireland, sure that Corrigan would come down there).

When chubby Harry Reutlinger was a high-school boy, ushering in a North Side Chicago theater, a movie called Net of the News decided him on his career. The old Evening American took him on as a copy boy, and in ten years of beat-covering he learned his home town inside out. By the time he landed on the city desk, he was an authority on the city's clergymen and its bookies, its main streets and back alleys. As a young sports writer, he uncovered the 1919 Black Sox scandal, later got a scoop on the Lindbergh kidnaping ransom note. Unlike the city editors of fiction, he is full of sweet 'reasonableness with his admiring staff of "Reutlinger's Rats."

Howdy, Chief. Reutlinger thinks nothing of telephoning across town--or across the world--and posing as the coroner, the Governor or a Cabinet member to wangle his news. When Texas cops caught Hoodlum Bonnie Parker for the FBI, Reutlinger phoned a Texas police chief, identified himself as the Chicago chief, burbled: "Just want to congratulate you! Anything my boys can do for you up here?" The flattered Texan spilled a detailed story of the capture. By the time the FBI got to the Texan to tell him not to tip off the newspapers, the Herald-American had the story on Page One.

Except for World War I service, and time out to attend his parents' funerals, 48-year-old Reutlinger has never been absent or tardy. "Got the damnedest constitution you ever saw," he brags. "Lots of women would be glad to have a skin like mine. I have a beautiful skin." His staffers don't resent the fact that he is a vain little man who wears imported ties, expensive suits, elevator heels. But strangers who call to offer stories, and begin by saying "How are you?" are sometimes taken aback when Reutlinger rattles: "Oh, I'm not so good. Just killed my grandmother."

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