In Manhattan's Memorial Hospital last week, a visitor dropped in on the patient in Room 941. They had met only once before, in 1944, but recognized each other on sight. The patient, a writer, had whimsically described his caller then as "a large and most distinguished looking figure, in beautifully tailored, soft white flannels." That time the visitor had not really been looking for him. This time, when he left, Death took Alfred Damon Runyon, 66, with him.
The other encounter, a close call, had spared Runyon's life but struck him dumb. His larynx had been removed, to check a throat cancer. Since then, his gold pencil, by swift jottings in a loose-leaf notebook, had done all his talking for him. ("When he was mad," said a pal, "he'd just write in big, bold letters.") In "Mindy's," at Table 50 in the Cub Room of the Stork Club, and all along Broadway, the hard, bright, tawdry street that was his beat, the guys and dolls had known he was on borrowed time. But only gaunt Damon Runyon, suffering from cancer, gallstones and cirrhosis of the liver, had known how heavily he had borrowed.
In recent months, as his time ran out, Runyon had not tried to hoard it. He had roamed the town more eagerly than ever, as if to take with him all he could of the sharp flavor of the characters he half-created, half-observed: Milk Ear Willie, Harry the Horse, Sam the Gonoph, Light-Finger Moe, and Regret, the horse player. He spent many nights cruising with Walter Winchell, his fellow Hearstling and perhaps his closest friend, chasing police calls.
Education of a Tramp. After the fourth grade in Pueblo, Colo., Damon Runyon's schooling ended, and his education began. His tutors (like "Our Old Man," as he later called his dad) were tramp printers who could quote the Bible, Shakespeare and Bob Ingersoll with equal conviction. From them he learned, among other priceless lessons, to be a good listener.
He was 26 when he got his first look at Manhattan and knew instantly that the big town was for him. But he had been a writer since he was twelve, when his father printed his first piece, a poem, in the Old Man's Pueblo Chieftain. By the time Damon hit Manhattan he had been soldier, sportswriter, boxing promoter, and manager of a saloon's ball club. He had knocked around enough to pick up flavor for a thousand short stories, and he was soon selling them, at $30 to $100 apiece. Eventually his name on a front cover was said to be good for a 60,000 spurt in a magazine's sales, and he got $5,000 a story.
He liked being a reporter, and became a first-rate one—a trained seal who gave the Runyon touch to prize fights and kidnap trials.
In 1932, needing money, he returned to fiction with sardonic, sentimental fairy tales like Three Wise Guys, the story of the Nativity retold in Runyon's "historical present," by a modern Grimm who talked out of the corner of his mouth. With Howard Lindsay, he turned out a play, A Slight Case of Murder. A score of his stories (Little Miss Marker, etc.) became movies; a few, like The Big Street (1942) he produced himself. Hearst christened The Brighter Side, the daily column where Runyon's endearing ignoramuses, Joe and Ethel Turp, were born.