Bing's Song

One day last week Jack Schermerhorn, a police reporter on the Detroit Free Press, hustled from the police station to the office. He was looking for Malcolm Wallace Bingay, Free Press editorial director, and he was going to give him a thrashing. Schermerhorn had just read Bingay's new book, Of Me I Sing (Bobbs-Merrill; $3.50),.and he didn't like what Bingay had written about his father and his uncle (James Schermerhorn, once editor of the Detroit Times). Sample: "I have never met a more precise and perfect example of a hypocrite . . ."

It took Managing Editor Dale Stafford to keep young (26) Schermerhorn from taking a punch at 64-year-old Newsman Bingay. More than one Detroit newsman wished Stafford had not bothered. Big (205 lbs.) Malcolm ("Bing") Bingay is one of Michigan's best known citizens, but hardly one of its best loved. His autobiography is a revealing self-portrait of an editorial egocentric who made good.

Crackpots & Misfits. Bing was expelled from high school for sassing a teacher and went to work as a printer's devil, later as a $2.50-a-week office boy at the Detroit News, Michigan's biggest daily (present circ. 432,000).

At 17, Bing got a raise to $4 and a reporter's job. At 21, he was sports editor though he didn't know how to score a baseball game. Soon he was pouring out four columns a day as an expert.

At 24, he was made city editor. Bing's recollection of his staff: "I do not suppose in the history of journalism there was ever such a bunch of misfits, crackpots and incompetents ... in one newspaper office . . ." The feeling, as Bingay tells it now, was obviously mutual. Reporters passed up stories for the sheer pleasure of seeing the boy wonder scooped.

Angles & Iffy. But if Bingay was tough, aggressive and insensitive, he also knew Detroit, and knew the angles. At 29, he was managing editor of the News. When Hearst bought the Detroit Times and stole away News readers by printing horse-racing odds, Bing lobbied through a state law banning the publication of such odds.

In 1928 the News fired him, because "I was saying the right things in the wrong way and doing a lot of drinking," and later he joined the Free Press. As editorial director, Bing masterminded a story on an American Legion parade that won five Free Press reporters the Pulitzer prize. He began a daily column, "Good Morning," composed of topical comment, literary notes and bad puns. Later, when Detroit went pennant-crazy over its 1934 baseball team, he wrote a sports column as "Iffy the Dopester." Loaded with literary allusions and folksy idiom, the "Iffy" columns became a Detroit craze. There were Iffy clubs, cocktails and cushions, and the column now appears on the editorial page.

Bing's blunders are as celebrated as his successes. He made most of Michigan mad with an abusive obituary of the respected Senator James Couzens. He ran a frontpage article accusing Radio Father Charles E. Coughlin of "congenital inability to tell the truth," and Father Coughlin filed a $4,000,000 libel suit against the Free Press (the suit was dropped). Day after last November's election, the Free Press carried an editorial announcing Dewey's victory.

Despite bad-tempered outbursts, Bing has usually shown a notable ability to get along with the boss. When John S. Knight bought the Free Press in 1940, he took control of the news columns away from Bingay, left him in charge only of the editorial page. Nevertheless, writes Bing solemnly: "John S. Knight [is] in my book the best of all publishers . . ."

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