October 4 is a date that should be celebrated by veteran newspaper reporters and editors such as myself with a tip of the fedora, a swig of beer before noon, and a nostalgic attempt at stilted, tough-guy lingo: On this day, in 1880 Damon Runyon was born.
His origin story actually began in Manhattan -- as in Manhattan, Kansas -- a happy coincidence that still delights the denizens of his adopted home town. It was, wrote Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, "as though God were giving him the right birthplace for the obit but keeping him away from his true home until he was ready."
Runyon's father sold his Kansas paper and moved west, settling in the southern Colorado town of Pueblo. Young Damon learned in his father's shop before winding up in the state capital, plying his trade in that den of iniquity on Champa Street known as the Denver Post.
The Post was a pipeline of sorts for New York newspapering in the early 20th century. Harold Ross, who founded the New Yorker, came from the Denver Post. So did the legendary Gene Fowler. In 2009, when the Runyon-inspired "Guys and Dolls" re-opened on Broadway, Gopnik observed that Colorado wasn't Iowa. In the colorful (and possibly exaggerated) bios of Runyon, Ross, and Fowler there are crooked card games, fixed fights, and near-duels outside saloons with Bat Masterson. These fellows aren't working on farms back in the West, in other words, and are not intimidated by city slickers.
I've written about Runyon and Fowler before in this space. As a Colorado-trained newsman, I feel obliged to keep their memories alive. In any event, God decided, or, rather, William Randolph Hearst decided (and in his newsrooms that was a distinction without a difference), that Damon Runyon was ready for New York at age 30. Beginning in 1911, he slowly carved out a reputation as a dour dandy and innovative wordsmith.
As he branched into fiction, the stars of Runyon's short stories are not the characters, despite their colorful names: Nathan Detroit, Dave the Dude, Meyer Marmalade, Harry the Horse, and Goodtime Charley. Nor are the plots memorable; the story lines are unlikely and hard to follow. No, the star of a Runyon short story is the prose itself.
In "Tobias the Terrible," the narrator -- and Runyon was always his own narrator -- says: "If I have all the tears that are shed on Broadway by guys in love, I will have enough salt water to start an opposition ocean to the Atlantic and Pacific, with enough left over to run the Great Salt Lake out of business. But I wish to say I never shed any of these tears personally, because I am never in love, and furthermore, barring a bad break, I never expect to be in love …"
In real life, Runyon had a romantic side: He left his wife for a Spanish countess with the Runyonesque name Patrice Amati del Grande, who actually turned out to be a Mexican dancer some years his junior. Normally, though, he was not known as sentimentalist. Those who knew Runyon found him as diffident, if dapper, and slightly formidable.
"Cold fish was the phrase often used to describe him," H. Allen Smith wrote in his biography of Gene Fowler. "[Runyon] was unsmiling and almost always looked churlish and irascible. Even people who didn't know him got out of his way when they saw him approaching."
Fowler, who had an uneasy relationship with the man who wanted to be his mentor, ascribed this behavior to shyness. Whatever the reason, Runyon learned the argot that would make him famous -- and inspire not just "Guys and Dolls," but also several Hollywood movies -- with a trick of the journalistic trade that seems in short supply these days:
Damon Runyon was a listener. He found the grist for his tales at Lindy's, an all-night Jewish deli. There he sat, and absorbed, taking mental notes as the likes of Arnold Rothstein and Frank Costello came in for their midnight snacks, planning God-knows-what.
"I am the sedentary champion of the city," Runyon explained. "In order to learn anything of importance, I must remain seated. Why I am the best is that I can last an entire day without causing a chair to squeak."
Let me hasten to add that Damon Runyon is also the man who advised Gene Fowler, when the younger man hit New York, that he needed to "toot his own trumpet." So, no, self-promotion among the media did not begin with Twitter.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.