Belt-Level Stuff

The thing his chain of papers needed, said shrewd little Roy Howard, was a change of pace. The Scripps-Howard chain had a full stable of heavy and medium-heavy thinkers. What was needed was lighter, belt-level reading matter--about meat, sex, the movies. Result: by last week 30-year-old Robert C. Ruark, a balding, Southern-accented graduate of the sports pages, was the country's fastest-climbing columnist. His readily readable pieces, studded with flip and flossy phrases, were running in 19 Scripps-Howard papers and 20 others. He was making $500 a week, and had the promise of $40,000 next year, if his list of papers jumped to 100 in six months.

Last week Ruark reminded his readers that it was an even year since the Navy "granted me its most priceless boon, that final handshake." On his anniversary, he took inventory of his crusades. Mostly they were small-bore: by carefully contrived cracks against radio, Southern cooking, horse operas, hairdos and politicking veterans, he had snared 10,000 letters. They had called him a "fascist, warmonger, race baiter and moron. Added to draft dodger, horse hater, sadist and war criminal, it seems I am a very unsavory gent, indeed, and I sometimes wonder how I stand me."

A Blow for Bobo. Early in the game Ruark had learned the nuisance value of heaving a rock at a greenhouse--if it was not too big a greenhouse. When he went to Washington, B.C. in 1936, he had a degree from the University of North Carolina, hitch in the merchant marine, and $4.25 in change. A copy boy's job gave him his toe hold on the Scripps-Howard Washington News. In a few months (and after ( few staff shakeups by Editor Lowell Mellett) the cocksure young Irishman was the paper's top sportswriter. One day he accused Bobo Newsom, Detroit pitcher, of brawling in the Shoreham Hotel. Newsom offered to punch him in the eye if he came around. Ruark went around to the Tigers' locker room, where they squared off, swung at each other, started a free-for-all. Ruark's name got into sports pages all over the country.

In 1942 he was commissioned an ensign, served ten months as a gunnery officer on Atlantic and Mediterranean convoys. Later, in the Solomons, he nearly lost an arm when his jeep overturned. When he recovered he got a job as press censor at Sydney. Scripps-Howard tried to spring him out of the Navy after Ernie Pyle died; luckily for Ruark, he stayed in, and was spared the ordeal of trying to follow in Pyle's footsteps (TIME, May 14, 1945).

Last fall he returned to the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance in Washington, waited his chance at a columnist's spot, and got set to make a big noise. "I looked around," he says frankly, "for the biggest rock I could find to throw." His article on how returning G.I.s were shocked by American women (their high heels, their long red nails, their awful hats) drew 2,500 letters and Roy Howard's roving eye.

Today Ruark keeps his own hours, writes his stuff in his Manhattan duplex, tries it out on his wife and a secretary. He is pleased when people compare him to ex-Sportswriter Westbrook Pegler, thinks "Pegler at his best is the best technical writer I ever read." But Ruark does not aim to get stuck to any tar-baby, like labor-baiting, Roosevelt-hating Peg.

Says Ruark: "I'm a dissenter, too, but I'm a pretty ordinary hack. I'm a political eunuch, and I don't evaluate myself as a heavy thinker."

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