Broadway Minstrel

When Jimmy Cannon was a newspaper shaver, the late Damon Runyon gave him some advice: "The best way to make a living is to be a sportswriter." Cannon followed the advice, and Runyon liked the results so well that before he died he made Cannon "the custodian of my reputation when I'm gone." At 43, as sport columnist for the New York Post, sad-eyed Jimmy Cannon has also come closer than any other sportswriter to taking Runyon's place. His favorite columnar character is Two Head Charlie, a thoughtful horse player, who talks like this: "You take a real ugly bum . . . with a face a monkey would be ashamed of. Let him get a shave and a haircut and meet a broad. What's the first thing the broad says to him, she says you look cute tonight . . . I admit I look like a kangaroo . . . But every broad I take out tells me I'm cute. Soon as a dame says that, I know I can't trust her."

Delicatessen Nobility. Bums, bettors, Broadway guys, hangers-on and contestants at every sports arena are material for Cannon's column; his ear is finely tuned to their talk. "They're a kind of delicatessen nobility," says he. "I know lots of guys who talk like Two Head." Cannon knows them because he was born & raised in their midst, on Manhattan's lower West Side, still lives in a hotel midway between Broadway and Madison Square Garden. At 17, as a copy boy on the Daily News, Cannon's skill with words caught the city editor's notice. Once, when a crank invaded the city room and introduced himself as "God," Cannon answered: "Pleased to meetcha. Heard a lot aboutcha."

Cannon worked on almost every New York daily, first made a name as a columnist with "Sergeant Cannon Says," a column of eloquent, olive-drab barracks talk written for the now defunct PM while he was a G.I. Later, Stars & Stripes made him a combat correspondent in Europe. At war's end he joined the Post to write sports, did a stint as a war correspondent in Korea. When he saw the Herald Tribune's Marguerite Higgins at the front, Cannon remarked: "Meeting Maggie at the front for the first time is like meeting Brenda Frazier in the gents room at Grand Central Station."

Nobody Asked Him. An insomniac, he reads voraciously when he can't sleep, calls sleeplessness "culture's greatest ally." He drinks from 20 to 30 cups of coffee a day (no liquor), makes regular rounds of such Manhattan hangouts as Toots Shor's, Lindy's, the Stage delicatessen or Sardi's. When Tony Galento, the barrel-shaped bartender-turned-fighter, was flattened by Joe Louis, Cannon wired big (250 Ib.) Toots Shor: "Lay low. This is a bad night for fat saloonkeepers." Scarcely a day passes in season that Cannon doesn't go to the ballpark, fights or races. Once, after a well-wisher introduced him to an English duchess and told him that she had "married three titles," Cannon answered: "So what? So did Mrs. Henry Armstrong."

His columns are full of opinions and hard-eyed writing on everything from sports and stuffed shirts to women and war. "Any man is in difficulty," writes Bachelor Cannon, "if he falls in love with a woman he can't knock down with the first punch." After Korea, he reported that "combat soldiers are the loneliest people in the world. What a man does in a period of war he carries around inside of him forever." When Herman Hickman, Yale's 300-lb. football coach resigned, Cannon began a column: "There is enough room in one of Herman Hickman's suits for an average fullback to work the hidden-ball trick with a Shetland pony."

In Two Head Charlie's mouth, Cannon put this comment on manners: "You're licked before you start. You're dead soon as you tip your hat to a dame. You tip your hat. What does that mean? It means the broad is something and you're nothing. It starts off with a guy admitting he's a piece of dirt. Why can't a dame tip her hat back?" Cannon keeps his pockets stuffed with notes for his "Nobody Asked Me, But . . ." columns. Samples: "Nothing improves an actress' diction more than marrying money." "I'm no philanthropist, but I always get the check when I dine with a guy who protects his bank roll with an ornate money clip." "If you have to make notes in a telephone booth, chances are the lights won't work."

Cannon is dedicated to his job and sports. Once a friend urged Cannon to accompany him to a social-register party. Said Cannon: "As a sportswriter, I'm only interested in people who sweat."

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