Factmonger

Speaker Sam Rayburn called him the best-informed man in town, and Franklin D. Roosevelt said he had never heard a better toastmaster. He knew all the big and middle-sized people by their first names. Yet gaunt George William Stimpson had never amounted to much as a Washington correspondent. At 49, he was barely making a living by grubbing regional news for his little string of Texas papers.

He had arrived in Washington a quarter century ago from Anamosa, Iowa to catch on briefly with the Washington Herald before landing a small job with Pathfinder (a news weekly which circulates mostly to farmers), where he ran a question & answer column that predated the radio quiz shows. Other reporters who had vaulted to fame and fat contracts wondered what kept him in his rut.

The answer was that George Stimpson was less a journalist than an encyclopedist who loved facts for their own sakes. He never learned the difference between a big fact and a little one; his head and his dim little office in the National Press Building were overstuffed with trivia. (His "A" file was crowded with items like "a in Thomas a Becket," and "Addison Sims of Seattle.") His cluttered, rolltop desk was buried under facts, but barren of news. He had a scholar's knowledge of Shakespeare, history and cats. Once he went to Europe just to track down elusive points like the exact height of Mary, Queen of Scots (it eluded him).

But last week puttering George Stimpson, who never learned how to make his wealth of contacts pay off in fame, was knee-deep in good luck. His factmongering had hit the jackpot: the Book-of-the-Month Club had picked up his Book about a Thousand Things (Harper; $3.50), a random selection snatched from his disheveled files, and he stood to make $50,000 from it. (Last year his Book about the Bible, a similar sampling from his "B" files, surprised its publisher--and its author--by selling 30,000 copies.) Mildly bewildered, Bachelor George Stimpson muttered: "I don't understand about money; they either don't give you any or they throw it at you."

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