"Is That So?"

Every weekday morning around 11, a stooped figure with thick glasses, a glistening bald pate and a slight scowl would step off a Broadway bus and trudge to the plain edifice that houses the New York Times. Colleagues on the Times took no offense when kindly Simeon Strunsky failed to return their elevator nods; they all knew that he was nearsighted.

Yet as the anonymous author for 15 years of the often wise, often witty column, "Topics of The Times," Strunsky had a far-darting eye. In a single week, he looked at plays of violence, Dartmouth College, the Marshall Plan, Herodotus, New Mexico (from dinosaurs to A-bombs), "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Eastern potentates, bestsellers, babysitting, Eva Peron, the War Assets Administration and Existentialism. Strunsky's skillful use of the telling fact, the apt comparison, the impeccable word made "Topics" a model of the vanishing essay form. Without blushing, his admirers, from Franklin P. Adams to Lin Yutang, compared Strunsky to Addison & Steele and Charles Lamb.

Earnest Socialist. To reach this eminence, Strunsky had to master a language not his own. The Strunskys came to New York's lower East Side from Vitebsk, Russia, when Simeon was seven. At 17, Strunsky won a scholarship to Columbia University, made Phi Beta Kappa, was an earnest Socialist.

After graduation, he joined the editorial staff of an encyclopedia where he developed the card-file memory and catch-all curiosity that are often watermarks of the great essayists. Shifting to the New York Evening Post as editorial writer and columnist, Strunsky became editor of its editorial page by 1920. When Cyrus H. K. Curtis bought the paper and started telegraphing editorials 'from Philadelphia, Strunsky "stepped into the subway one day and came on uptown" to the Times.

Humorous Tory. Strunsky's favorite topic was his beloved New York City, although he led a secluded life away from its glitter. He was forever holding up fashionable cliches to good-humored examination, asking himself (and his readers) "Is that so?" He would attack the steamrollers that seemed to be flattening originality out of American life. But in the next sentence, he would profess his faith in the ability of Americans to go their individual ways. Two Came to Town, the last of his eleven books, was one such affirmation.

Ex-Socialist Strunsky liked to call himself a "Tory." He clung to certain "oldfashioned beliefs," like the idea that "parents are a useful thing for children to have; that freedom is a good thing for everybody; that America is a pretty good country for its plain people . . . that the story of the occupation of the American continent is not an exclusive record of graft and plunder and wastage [and] that ,the industrial history of America [is] not entirely a story of company Cossacks riding down coal strikers . . . but also the story of a rising standard of living. . . ."

Last August, faithful "Topics" readers sensed that the column had changed hands. Strunsky, at 68, was ill. In the months since then, five Times editorial writers have taken turns at "Topics," marking time for Strunsky's return. But last week, in Princeton, N.J., one of the last of the essayists died.

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