The Press: Mrs. Winchell's Little Boy

"If only when my epitaph is readied," he once mused, "they will say: Here is Walter Winchell—with his ear to the ground—as usual." Nobody, alas, was quite so piquant when Mrs. Winchell's little boy Walter, as he liked to style himself, died last week at 74.

In his acidulous prime, almost everybody had something to say about the country's most controversial neWWs-boy. To Ed Sullivan he was a "cringing coward"; to the California American Legion he was "America's No. 1 Patriot." Ben Hecht said he wrote "like a man honking in a traffic jam." H.L. Mencken lauded him as "an assiduous inventor...