The Press: Dear Uncle

As the play The Front Page would have it, nothing can stop a good Hearstling from getting his story. Last week ex-Hearstling Quentin Reynolds, who is suing Hearst Columnist Westbrook Pegler for $500,000 for calling him an “absentee war correspondent” (TIME, May 24), told how he stayed true to The Front Page tradition as a Collier’s war correspondent.

In Paris in 1940, Correspondent Reynolds handed a French government official a cable, which said: “Dear Uncle Franklin: I am having difficulty getting accredited to the French army. Time is important. Would you phone or cable Premier Reynaud and ask him to hurry things up. It was grand of you to phone me last night. Please give my love to Aunt Eleanor. Quent.” As Reynolds had hoped, the French official promptly accredited him. But to Reynolds’ embarrassment the official also volunteered to dispatch the cable to President Roosevelt, whom Reynolds had never even met. Explained Reynolds in a Manhattan court last week: “I didn’t think he would be fool enough to believe it. I hoped he would, though … I exercised [the] journalistic enterprise that I had learned [working for Hearst’s] International News Service.”