It's Friday, Oct. 4, 2024, a date celebrated by Colorado-trained newspaper men and women of a certain age (such as myself) with a tip of the fedora, a swig of Coors at the stroke of noon, and nostalgic and stilted tough-guy lingo. On this day in 1880, the great Damon Runyon was born.
Today is also the day of the week when I reprise a quotation intended to be uplifting or enlightening – or just entertaining. And Damon Runyon was certainly engaging.
His hometown was Manhattan, Kansas, a happy coincidence that still delights the denizens of his adopted hometown, the famous New York City borough of Manhattan. It was, noted New Yorker correspondent Adam Gopnik, "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, whose name was actually spelled Runyan, sold his Kansas newspaper and headed west, getting as far as Pueblo, Colorado. Young Damon learned the family trade there before branching out to bigger papers until he wound up at the largest one in the state, working at the Champa Street den of iniquity known as the Denver Post.
In the early 20th century, the Post was a pipeline of sorts for the New York media. Harold Ross, who founded The New Yorker, also came from the Denver Post. So did the legendary Gene Fowler. Trying to make sense of more than a decade ago when the Runyon-inspired "Guys and Dolls" was revived on Broadway, Gopnik observed simply 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 lawman/gunfighter Bat Masterson.
"These guys are not farming," Gopnik noted wryly, meaning that this fast crowd from the Mile High City was hardly intimidated by East Coast city slickers. Why would they be? As a cub reporter, Damon Runyon covered his first hanging at age 11.
In any event, God decided – or, rather, William Randolph Hearst decreed (and in his newsrooms that was a distinction without a difference) – that Damon Runyon was ready for New York at age 30. And so, beginning in 1911, Runyon began carving out his reputation as a dour dandy and innovative wordsmith.
As he branched into fiction, the stars of Runyon's short stories were not the characters, despite their colorful names: Nathan Detroit, Dave the Dude, Meyer Marmalade, Harry the Horse, and Goodtime Charley. Nor were the plots memorable; the storylines were improbable and difficult to follow. No, the star of a Runyon short story is the prose itself.
In "Tobias the Terrible," the narrator (Runyon himself) observes: "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, this wasn't strictly true. Runyon left his first wife for a much younger Spanish countess named Patrice Amati del Grande. He met her at a racetrack in Juarez where he'd gone to interview Pancho Villa. OK, the "Spanish countess" business was a Runyon contrivance. She was a Mexican dancer, and when they married in the 1930s, she was half his age. It didn't last.
"Cold fish was the phrase often used to describe him," Fowler biographer H. Allen Smith wrote of Runyon. "He 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. Jimmy Breslin, who penned the best Runyon biography, attributed his diffidence to Damon's difficult childhood. He was 8 when his mother died, and his father sent Damon's three sisters to live with their grandmother. The young boy grew up with, literally, no one to talk to. So he listened instead, which was how he mastered the argot that would make him famous and inspire not just "Guys and Dolls" but also several Hollywood movies. It's an old trick of the journalistic trade – we could use more of it today, particularly in political journalism.
In any event, at Lindy's, an all-night Jewish deli, Damon Runyon sat, and listened, and took mental notes as the likes of Arnold Rothstein and Frank Costello came in for their midnight snacks, planning God-knows-what. This was where he found the grist for his stories.
"I am the sedentary champion of the city," Runyon once 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."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on X @CarlCannon.
