The Pittsburgh Press (April 7, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
TUCSON, Ariz. – One of the main questions people all over the country keep asking me is, “Do you know Pegler personally?”
And I say, “Well, I know him a little, but not awfully well. Why?”
And then they always want to know what he’s actually like – if he’s big or little, if he is tough in person like he is in his columns, if he has gone permanently on the wagon, if he’s a religious fanatic, if he kicks his wife, and so on.
So now – having just spent an afternoon and evening with the Peglers – I’ll try to answer a few of those questions for you.
No, Westbrook Pegler is not a mean man or a sourpuss. He is pleasant to be with. He’s a big fellow, tall and well built. He is not on the wagon. He is a good Catholic, but by no means a fanatical one. He smokes, drinks and swears, as do almost all newspapermen. He does none of them to excess.
And among all my acquaintances, I don’t know of a man who absolutely dotes on his wife as Pegler does. If anything ever happened to her, it would go mighty tough with him.
It is hard for readers to reconcile Pegler the Professional Hater with Pegler a Human Being. If he isn’t mean at heart, they figure, then his column hating must be just a pose by which he can make a lot of money.
That definitely is not true. He is so serious and sincere about his work that it occupies a large portion of his thoughts, even when he’s on vacation. Just sitting with him before the fireplace in a pleasant chat, his conversation drifts almost magnet-like again and again to the subject of union racketeering.
Dipped into labor problems
Although his sole purpose in being out here now is to rest and relax, he has let himself get interested in some of Tucson’s labor problems. Fry-cooks and poor waitresses and small business owners get to him somehow with their troubles, and he can’t resist lending an ear.
In person as well as in print, Pegler is a man of definite opinions. There is no wishy-washiness in his attitudes. Most things to him are either good or bad.
And he isn’t “agin” quite everything, either. Right now, for instance, he thinks America is doing marvelously with its production program, and that it would be an indescribable calamity if anything were to happen to Mr. Roosevelt.
Pegler gets a terrific amount of mail, most of it bad. One reason he decided to take vacation now is that his mail was changing – it was getting too pro-Pegler! That scared him to death. He thought he must be getting the wrong slant on things.
Also, he says he found he was getting too worked-up and wrote angrily and used words “too strong,” which sounded odd coming from a man noted for the strongest words in America.
Because of his strong words, the public realizes by now that Pegler must do a vast amount of research, and be able to back up every word he writes. Consequently, most people assume he has a large research staff working for him.
Pegler does his own research
He does not have. He is his own researchist. He does it by a large amount of telephoning, frequent trips to Washington to look personally into records, and by a man-killing amount of reading and wading through court opinions and legal documents.
Right here in the house now, he has a bag of printed matter weighing 50 pounds that he must read before starting his columns again.
Pegler, like the rest of us, wishes that he’d write “funny” columns oftener than he does. But he just has so much material on his various crusades there doesn’t seem space very often any more for a funny column.
The Peglers have built a lovely house out here in the desert, for vacationing and maybe some day retiring – though I doubt that will come very soon.
Mrs. Pegler came out ahead of time to get the house all fixed up. They are right out in the desert, thoroughly surrounded and hidden by cactus and desert growth. But inside, the house is as modern as a Spitfire. There is even a swimming pool in back, but it’s been too chilly to swim during Peg’s vacation.
It’s no use for you to come looking for their place, because it’s hard to find and the Peglers will soon be gone anyhow. Since he is looked upon as a celebrity, Pegler has had to throw up a wall around himself or he’d never get anything done.
He’s very hard to get to. That’s the way it has to be, and should be. True, the public provides his living by reading his column – but on the other hand the same public could destroy him if he’d let it use up all his time.
The Peglers have a station wagon, and drive into town frequently. Peg enjoys driving, but drives even more slowly than I do. They go out with friends occasionally, and have friends in to dinner. The other night they had a whole roast pig.
Pegler doesn’t share my almost spiritual “feel” for the desert, but he does like it well enough to build out here, so I guess he can join my club. In fact I am now trying to work out some arrangement whereby I can help share his burdens with him – such as letting him continue the columns, while I, acting as his proxy, retire to the desert and do his resting for him.