Probably not since the days of the first transatlantic flyers had an air hop started with such a swash of publicity. The Army Air Transport Command, inaugurating weekly round-the-world flights, took along a reporter from all three press associations.
The A.P. assigned its Washington Bureau Chief Paul Miller, who played the story solemnly: "The Globester took off for Tripoli at 12:30 a.m." Funnyman Fred Othman was only slightly funny for the U.P.: "Hand me down my white burnoose, light the incense and call the dancing girls." I.N.S. sent Inez Robb, Hearst's glib, grey go-girl, who had to admit there wasn't much to write about: "We are well on the way to establishing the alltime record of circumnavigating the globe without seeing anything."
Red Flannels & Black Type. They labored mightily to make magic out of what had become commonplace: the Azores one day, Cairo the next. By the time she reached San Francisco, Inez Robb was air-dizzy from high-flown metaphors. Wrote she: "The world is shrinking like a pair of red flannels in a spring rain." The travelers got back to Washington in six days, six hours, having taken twice as long as globe-girdling Howard Hughes did in 1938, because they went a much longer way.
The straining Hearst press gave its reporter a daily headline play (INEZ ROBB PLANE FORCED DOWN), but editors generally lost interest in the flight before it got past Africa. Said Washington Post Publisher Eugene Meyer: "It's nothing like Nellie Bly."*
Editors might have known that the journey of one plane would be small news to a public used to reading about 1,000-plane flights through ack-ack and enemy fighters. The Globester was a symbol of the postwar scrabble for news. The war's communiqués had given the press news readymade; now editors had to cut the cloth to fit, for themselves.
Rape & Heat. Chicago papers announced a "rape wave" in suburban Evanston. Actually, rape had increased only slightly, but there was now more space in which to write about it. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer sent a reporter to "rediscover" the State of Washington, another to look up kinfolk of Seattle Scandinavians in Norway, Sweden, Denmark.
In Los Angeles two hardy perennials, a heat wave and a crime wave, tied for top local billing. The Scripps-Howard Washington News began to berate the Army for its slowness in demobilizing. Said Managing Editor Aubrey Graves: "Now that the war's over, the Army's fair game." Everywhere editors played strikes heavily.
Most newspapers still felt the handicap of incompetent or depleted local staffs. But the city editor was becoming an important man again.
*The 22-year-old girl reporter whom Joseph Pulitzer sent round the world in 1889, to see if she could beat Jules Verne's fictional Phileas Fogg, who took 80 days. She made it, by train and steamer, in 72.