First he worked as a “picture chaser,” stealing photographs of crime victims right under the noses of distraught family members. A good (or bad) number of Prohibition-era gangsters “trained as gunmen in the circulation wars,” writes Gorbach. It became a three-way war, as the top dailies fought each other, and all sides attacked organized labor.”Īccording to one figure, 27 newsboys were killed between 19. “What started with knives and brickbat brawls between gangs of neighborhood toughs evolved in shooting sprees that claimed the lives of newsboys and residents alike. Gorbach’s book provides good general background about the corruption, venality, political self-interest and journalistic competition in Chicago around the time Hecht arrived in 1910.Ī decade earlier, William Randolph Hearst hired a Chicago West Sider, Max Annenberg, to “organize crews of ‘sluggers’ to strong-arm newsboys into ditching stacks of rival newspapers,” Gorbach writes. It was a childhood of wild contrasts between “the early parts of his life on the Lower East Side, and then this very pastoral, capital-R Romantic middle-American life in Racine,” Hoffman notes.Īfter graduating high school, Hecht attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The house, no longer there, was at 838 Lake Ave., overlooking the lake. He and his brother toured with a trapeze act one summer. He holed up in his attic bedroom, in a boarding house filled with retired circus performers, reading book after book. Hecht’s fellow Chicago Daily News writer Carl Sandburg once wrote a poem calling Hecht “a Jewish Huck Finn.” In Racine, he sailed a homemade boat on Lake Michigan. For a time, Hecht chaired the Racine High School Jest Committee. While attending Racine High School, Hecht wrote advertising copy for the family store and “dashed off advertising jingles to induce local purveyors of cigars and fuel oil to take out ads in school playbills,” according to the Hecht website, maintained by Hecht scholar Florice Whyte Kovan. This was a few blocks west of what Hecht called “the great sea, Lake Michigan.” Father Joseph and mother Sarah ran the Paris Fashion Shop downtown across from Monument Square, the epicenter of Fourth of July parades and other civic commemorations. had a few dozen Jews among its population of nearly 30,000, though increased overseas migration increased those numbers substantially in the century’s first decade. In the blur of his early years the family lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, then the Bronx, Boston, Philadelphia and, briefly, before returning for a 14-year stay, Chicago. His younger brother, Peter, came along four years later. In his writings, improbably enough, Hecht is hard-pressed to recall any anti-Semitic bullying in his childhood. But for him, his Jewishness didn’t really become important until he felt compelled to respond to anti-Semitism.” The fact that he started out his life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, speaking Yiddish, going to his aunt’s parties where all these famous Yiddish actors were hanging around … that must’ve been important to his sense of self. I think he was a Jew all along, just less conscious of it. Thus, oddly, in addition to becoming a Jew in 1939 I became also an American - and remained one.”Īuthor Hoffman says she “doesn’t really buy that. In his lavishly imaginative autobiography “A Child of the Century,” Hecht wrote: “I had been no partisan of democracy in my earlier years … but now (by 1939) that it was the potential enemy of the German Police State I was its uncarping disciple. Inspired by Hecht and MacArthur's play "The Front Page," it was doctored, without credit, by Hecht. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell chase the big story in "His Girl Friday" (1940).
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