Eddie Guest's Rival

For Mother's Day, Edgar A. ("Eddie") Guest ground out his daily "pome" in the Detroit Free Press:

. . . This the mother that we knew!

Never any life was purer.

Gentle, tender, brave and true,

Never any love was surer.*

At this sort of banal jingling, 65-year-old Eddie Guest was hard to beat, at least as far as the Free Press's circulation department was concerned. But in the rival Detroit News, 58-year-old Anne Campbell, a grandmother herself, did her level best:

. . . The modern mother we agree,

Does not reflect the art

Of Whistler, but who cannot see

Her sweet, old-fashioned heart?

Six days a week for 25 years, Anne Campbell has been turning out pieces like that, rarely any better and seldom any worse. She has been at it indefatigably since 1922, when the News began to look around the city room for someone to offset the already popular Poetical Guest. The searchers for talent could find no one with the same flair for carefully chopped meter, the same tin ear for prosody, and the same big heart. Anne heard about the search from her husband, George Washington Stark, then News city editor (and now a columnist), cried, "I can do it." The next morning she rushed into the editor's office, plumped a fistful of verse on his desk and got the job.

Last week, over 7,500 poems later, Anne found proof that her folksy sentiment had won a public of its own. Fifteen hundred of her fans gathered in the Masonic Temple for a silver anniversary. There were special tables full of people whose causes she had supported: the Salvation Army, the Old Newsboys, the Michigan Crippled Children's Hospital. Detroit's Mayor Edward J. Jeffries saluted her. The president of Wayne University, David D. Henry, said that "she has helped to make our town great."

There were greetings from Fans Tallulah Bankhead, Billie Burke and Henry Ford II, and among the guests was Edgar Guest himself, who leaned over Anne's armful of roses, bussed her soundly and said to the audience: "There is no one for whom I have greater affection."

Anne Campbell, a friendly lady with grey-streaked hair, admits that sometimes her stuff gets "a bit corny." But she works hard over her verses, laboriously pecking them out a month in advance on her typewriter. Wherever she goes, her notebook goes with her; sometimes friends find her interrupting a conversation to write down some idea for a verse ("I'd like to sweep my soul in spring, And let the sunshine flood my brain"). Her verses pay her $10,000 a year, are syndicated in 30 U.S., Canadian and British papers, and draw about 100 fan letters a week.

Through tears that just welled up and kept coming, she tried to explain at the banquet how she felt about her popularity:

When through the midst of doubt my

pathway wends,

I count my rosary of friends:

The young and old who make the dark

days bright,

Believing in me, thinking my way

right. . . .

* From the poem, Mother's Day, copyright 1947 by Edgar A. Guest.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.