Edgar A. Guest: A Biography

By Royce Howes

When an enthusiastic admirer asked Eddie Guest, “What is the best thing you have ever done?” he replied, “Madam, I hope I haven’t done it yet!” Probably this answer best illustrates Eddie’s twinkling sense of humor, his refreshing modesty, and his all-pervading optimism.

In these days of confused thinking and chaotic world conditions, it is truly inspiring to read of a life which epitomizes the homely virtues and simple verities, plus a jovial and robust love of living, about which Eddie Guest has written for so many years. And it is by no means accidental that his biographer ends this book with a sentence often on Eddie’s lips: “It’s been great fun—all of it!”

“His editor and longtime friend Royce Howes has written the biography Guest deserves...Royce Howes has done a biography of a likeable and human man in not too adulatory a fashion; and it is readable.”—The Los Angeles Times

“Hearty friendship and mutuality of association combined with author competence have produced a book which, in the most vital sense, will be of interest to all Americans.”—The Yuma Daily Sun

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valmy Publishing
• Release date: Dec 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789126228

Royce Howes

ROYCE BUCKNAM HOWES (1901-1973) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. Born on January 3, 1901 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Howes moved to Detroit in 1927 and joined the Detroit Free Press, where he remained for 39 years, until his retirement as editorial director in 1966. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, achieving the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, and received the Bronze Star. He was an editor for the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes. Howes received the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for an editorial published on July 16, 1954. Titled “An Instance of Costly Cause and Effect Which Detroiters Should Weigh Soberly” concerned the cause of an unauthorized strike by a local of the United Automobile Workers’ union that idled 45,000 Chrysler workers. He also won the National Headliner Award for editorial writing. A close friend for many years of the prolific American poet, Edgar A. Guest, Howes served as Guest’s long-time editor and eventually as his biographer. In the 1930s and 1940s, he wrote and published numerous crime novels, many for the “Crime Club,” which were popular in the 1930s, including Death on the Bridge (1935), The Callao Clue (1936), Death Dupes a Lady (1937), Murder at Maneuvers (1938) and Night of the Garter Murder (1939). Howes died in Royal Oak, Michigan on March 18, 1973, aged 72.

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Text originally published in 1953 under the same title.

© Valmy Publishing 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

EDGAR A. GUEST

A BIOGRAPHY

BY

ROYCE HOWES

EDGAR A. GUEST PORTRAIT BY JOHN S. COPPIN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

ACKNOWLEDGMENT 6

FOREWORD 7

CHAPTER I—Charles Hoyt Hires a Boy 8

CHAPTER II—Origins of a First Citizen 11

CHAPTER III—Arthur Mosely Prints a Verse 17

CHAPTER IV—Reporter and Columnist 23

CHAPTER V—Decision in the Rain 28

CHAPTER VI—Days Bright and Dark 32

CHAPTER VII—Non-Sectarian Episcopalian 37

CHAPTER VIII—Onto the Big Stage 43

CHAPTER IX—Man Working 49

CHAPTER X—The Uneven Road 54

CHAPTER XI—Success of Two Fathers 59

CHAPTER XII—In Matters of Character 65

CHAPTER XIII—Friendliness Unlimited 71

CHAPTER XIV—Some of Those Closest 76

CHAPTER XV—Certain Affiliations 83

CHAPTER XVI—Among Honors Paid 90

CHAPTER XVII—Radio and Hollywood 95

CHAPTER XVIII—Source of Subjects 102

CHAPTER XIX—Foundations of Appeal 109

CHAPTER XX—Denial of a Designation 115

CHAPTER XXI—It’s Been Great Fun.... 122

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 127

DEDICATION

To Dorothy Howes, who has endured the creation of several books without plaint, and who has been signally helpful with this one as with the others, this book is dedicated.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

An immensely great acknowledgment is made to Bess Maynard and to Bud Guest and, indeed, to the subject of this book, himself. Without their assistance and patience, it could not have been written. Nor can acknowledgment be omitted to the many, too numerous to name, who have contributed their personal reminiscences and anecdotes.

FOREWORD

In the newspaper business, there are few among us who have practiced it as long as Edgar A. Guest, and none who has been more widely read over such a great number of years.

Eddie Guest was a reporter before the turn of the century. His verse has been a feature constantly syndicated since 1916. His public never tires of him, and it is regularly replenished as the new generations of readers come along.

He has the quality of being a fixed star in the firmament of journalism, where transient comets and briefly flashing meteors are a good deal more common.

For all of us who want to set a good course in the business of producing daily newspapers, Eddie Guest’s star is one by which we can steer. And his work evidences a fact concerning the millions who read our newspapers which too many who write and edit decline to believe. That fact is that warmth—the sympathetic, human, and often homely portrayal of mankind’s deeds, emotions, faiths, and foibles—has a demand at least equalling that for the sensational, the brittle, and the morbid.

This can hardly be called a revelation which never would have been made except for Eddie Guest. But he has given it strong emphasis in that very place in which what his writing epitomizes is too often wanting—the newspaper.

Nor can it be urged that Eddie Guest is somehow detached from the main stream of journalism because he is a specialist, and that what he evidences does not apply.

Everything Eddie Guest has been and done has stemmed from the success of his work as a writer for newspapers—first, for The Detroit Free Press and then, additionally, for scores of papers elsewhere. Without the acceptance and affection he gained as a newspaper writer, the rest scarcely would have been likely.

Very early, Eddie Guest discerned a fundamental truth about what people like to read. And it isn’t amiss to say it is a truth which reflects vastly more credit on reader predilections than some who cater to them are willing to accord.

In the newspaper business, we are very proud and appreciative of Eddie Guest. Especially is this so on The Free Press, where he is so devotedly one of our own. And one of our great satisfactions is that he is no less proud to be one of us.

John S. Knight

CHAPTER I—Charles Hoyt Hires a Boy

BIOGRAPHICALLY speaking, the Eddie Guest story begins on Aug. 20, 1881, in Birmingham, England. That was the day and place of Edgar Albert Guest’s birth. But it is better started with an unrecorded date in the springtime of 1895.

Not only is it the most historically momentous of the story’s dates, but Eddie Guest’s own mention of that day’s incident in his random autobiographical jottings gives the key to the man. Of it he wrote:

"I encountered Charles Hoyt one day on the steps of the Free Press Building, where I had been sent by my father on some small mission. He offered me a summer job in the bookkeeping department of the newspaper. That was in 1895, and I have been on the payroll of the Detroit Free Press ever since."

Hoyt was an accountant for the paper, a man who had earlier been attracted by the personality of the youngster to whom he tendered vacation employment. Eddie accepted the offer then and there, and Hoyt thus became the man who set a career in train.

Others had their key roles in its advancement, but to an accountant rather than an editor goes the distinction of having put Eddie Guest on the path that has taken him to a variety of fame, far more worldly goods than are the typical writing man’s lot, and above all a public affection infinitely beyond that given any other newspaper man.

For it is as a newspaper man that Eddie Guest, the recipient of all this, measures himself. His gauge is defined in the last of those three sentences about the chance meeting on the scuffed steps of an old newspaper building long since gone.

"...and have been on the payroll of the Detroit Free Press ever since."

Actually, for some decades now, the salary Eddie Guest has drawn from the paper is a microscopic fraction of what he has earned as a syndicated writer, book author, platform personality and, sometimes, thespian. It is, indeed, less than a new copy boy in the Free Press city room receives today.

But the dollars involved are not what count. Eddie Guest has said he would remain on the payroll if he were down for only one dollar a week. What looms is the symbolism, the token. Only a technicality in money terms, Eddie Guest’s wage is the tangible, indisputable affirmation that he is an active, working member of the newspaper craft and has been one for the whole of his adult career.

And that is something in which Eddie Guest takes an immense pride and satisfaction. For, however his demanding public may look upon him, his own will is to be, foremost and so long as he lives, a newspaper man. To those who know him intimately, it is an article of faith that if somehow Eddie Guest were required to surrender all his professional designations save one, he would choose to be known as a newspaper man.

Really, the affirmation given by the salary he has collected ever since 1895 is not at all necessary to the establishment of Eddie Guest’s claim on the title of newspaper man. The fact is that his fame rests on his being one of the tremendous reporters of all time.

To a superlative degree he has the three essentials of the reportorial trade, which are:

Abiding, indestructible interest in the affairs of people of every kind and estate.

A sure instinct for seeing, where most do not, the story which will enthrall.

The gift, when he puts his stories on paper, of reaching the heart—for the writer an infinitely more difficult and rewarding target than the head.

That he puts his tales in verse does not alter the case. It only enhances their telling through the lilt of meter and rhyme. They are still the stories from life’s stream which the good reporter instinctively knows how to fish out as it flows by.

Lesser journalists must take theirs largely from police blotters, chancelleries, the court docket, legislative halls, battlefields and disaster. Eddie Guest finds his in the common experiences, the universal emotions of the whole human race. The triumphs, the tragedies, the joys and sorrows, the moments of dignity and indignity which every man comes to know are his news sources—his beat.

The less gifted reporter blinds himself with the dictum that it isn’t a story unless the man bites the dog. Eddie Guest knows there can be a lot of appeal in a piece about a dog biting a man. So many men have been bitten by dogs.

Grant, of course, that because Eddie Guest is a great reporter, he is no less agile as a master of versification. The point is that his ability as a reporter could hardly have taken him to such a pinnacle of popularity without the other greatness. It is their coupling that has made him the daily bard of millions, a literary figure astounding not only in the breadth of his appeal but in its time span.

In the approximately four decades during which Eddie Guest has been writing a daily verse, public tastes, mores and acceptances have undergone evolution and revolution. Yet there never has been a down curve on the chart of his popularity, either as a writer or a public figure.

The universal, timeless element in the Eddie Guest appeal is vignetted in a letter written in the fall of 1952 by Allen E. Rupp, Superintendent of Schools at Cambridge, Ohio, to the editor of the Free Press. Eddie Guest had spoken before the Cambridge school pupils. Of his appearance Superintendent Rupp wrote in part:

As school people, we are thrilled by the fact that a man seventy years of age could so captivate an audience of youngsters in their teens. To say they like Eddie Guest is putting it mildly.

The explanation, as best it can be formulated, goes back to that sure instinct for finding themes among the experiences and emotions which all people share. Diogenes in his tub and Shah Jahan rearing his Taj Mahal could have understood equally It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home.

In that, and in the confirmed newspaper man’s absence of personal pretention, lie the substance of the fame and affection Eddie Guest has received for so long and in such quantity.

It lies in those things, and it lies, too, in an urgent sense of obligation to his task and to those who find pleasure in what he writes. To that obligation Eddie Guest gives—as would be expected of him—the newspaper man’s measure.

Ask him how many verses he has written or how many books they have been put into, and he will give no statistical answer. His reply will be, I’ve never missed a day or a deadline since 1916. That was the year his verses went into national syndication.

Incidentally, just from the standpoint of fidelity to the job, that is a record to stagger any of Eddie Guest’s colleagues in journalism. It would be a performance for the all-time annals if a man simply got out the daily livestock quotations without ever missing a day or a deadline for that run of years, say nothing of unfailingly getting under the wire with a product of creative inspiration.

Of Eddie Guest’s productivity at the typewriter any honest professional writing man would probably be willing to concur in what James Norman Hall says in his autobiography My Island Home.

Hall, in his youth, aspired to establish himself as a writer of verse and once endeavored to become poet for the Boston Globe. The Globe rejected Hall’s proposal. In relating the incident in My Island Home he wrote:

Had the decision been favorable I might have been the precursor of Eddie Guest, but I’m sure I never could have approached his versatility in writing newspaper verse—a poem a day, year in and year out.

Nor does it seem likely that anyone else could. In the history of journalism, no one ever hired a more phenomenal practitioner than did Charles Hoyt on that spring day in 1895.

CHAPTER II—Origins of a First Citizen

NOMINATION of any community’s first citizen depends on who is doing the nominating.

Leave it to the city hall crowd and it will turn out to be a political figure. The chamber of commerce names the man pre-eminent in business and with the greatest number chairmanships.

Then there is the individual who gets the accolade from the widest variety of people. The yardstick here is the number and mixture of requests for his presence, or the loan of his name to worthy causes. In Detroit, the hands-down winner of such a first-citizen poll would be Eddie Guest. Among Detroiters, in fact, Eddie Guest has long since acquired the stature of a cherished public institution. It was back in the mid-thirties that they celebrated their first officially proclaimed Eddie Guest Day.

And the story of his coming to that condition presents an entwining of parallel themes not likely to be bettered by a qualified dramaturgist deliberately setting out to deal in counterpoint. For Eddie Guest’s ascent to fame has kept absolute step with Detroit’s march from provincial city to industrial capital of the world.

He has seen it all happen, participated, known the rugged luminaries of the automotive pioneering years, been the intimate of the impresarios and the spear bearers, packed his mind with the anecdotes and idiosyncracies of men and a city raising full sail to the winds of destiny, and found his own name becoming a household word in far places at the same time FOB Detroit was becoming a byword across the land.

In the remote days of cobblestones and open-air trolleys, John Colquhoun’s lunch wagon took station each evening hard by Detroit’s city hall. The cuisine tradition it set in that area continues to be perpetuated by the lunch cart’s modern counterpart. Just around the corner from the city hall, along Lafayette, is a notably heavy deployment of hot dog and hamburger establishments bright with their stainless steel, porcelain and neon tubing.

Back in the days of Colquhoun and his modest prices, Eddie Guest was existing on the slim wage of a police reporter. He was a regular customer of the cart. At Colquhoun’s counter, he became the friend of another steady patron, this one a night engineer for the Edison Company, who also appreciated the bargains in food. A great part of what he earned was going into tinkering with a horseless carriage in a brick stable up on Bagley Avenue, where movie palaces now stand.

The horseless carriage turned into the Model T, and Eddie Guest’s lunch wagon companion turned into a billionaire. Until Henry Ford died, he and Eddie Guest were fast friends; long before Ford died, he had added the old Colquhoun lunch wagon to his Greenfield Village exhibition of Americana.

As he came to know Ford, Eddie Guest came to know them all—the Dodges, the Fishers, Henry M. Leland, the whole roster of men whose names are part-and-parcel of both the story of the automobile and the Detroit saga. They were men of almost furious dedication and singleness of purpose, those early builders of the industrial empires that Eddie Guest’s lifetime in Detroit has seen reared.

In 1928, Eddie Guest was one of the last to visit the bedside of Leland as he lay dying in a hospital.

Leland’s words that day never have left Eddie’s memory. He took his visitor’s hand with the instinctive grip of a man who knows he is going.

Eddie, Leland said, I don’t want to die yet. I want to live ten years more so I can build a better automobile.

The man whose production