Death of Brisbane

Three weeks ago 72-year-old Editor Arthur Brisbane of the Hearstpapers began to suffer heart attacks. Last week Editor Brisbane took to bed in his Manhattan apartment. On Christmas Eve, Mr. Brisbane murmured into one of his numerous Dictaphones, brought to his bedside, a timely installment of his far-famed "Today" column: "Another Christmas has come. . . . Nineteen Hundred and Thirty-six years ago . . . 'Peace on earth, 'good will toward men'. . . ." Before he could finish, Mr. Brisbane was tired out. His son Seward furnished the final paragraph, the first writing not actually by Arthur Brisbane ever to appear in the daily editorial column he had turned out for 39 years. On Christmas morning, the sick old editor's physicians prepared an oxygen tent, but could not use it, for Death had come to Arthur Brisbane.

The career which thus quietly closed, while not the most distinguished, was in many ways the most remarkable ever achieved by a writer for the U. S. Press. In annual salary ($260,000), and in readers reached (an estimated 30,000,000 a day), Arthur Brisbane far outstripped any other columnist. No less than 1,200 weekly papers carried his "This Week" contribution. Some 200 dailies beside the Hearstpapers ran "Today." As editor of the Hearst tabloid New York Daily Mirror, Mr. Brisbane turned out eight columns of special editorials a week. And every week in the Sunday Hearstpapers, Pundit Brisbane furnished the text for an illustrated page which dramatized some tremendous, if obvious, thought, or outlined the contents of a classic biography or history.

Not so much worried about the loss of such a prodigious volume of expert copy as he was deeply and genuinely moved by the death of an old friend, Arthur Brisbane's boss personally filled the "Today" space day after Christmas:

"I know that Arthur Brisbane was the greatest journalist of his day. ... I know that this nation and the world have lost incalculably in the death of Arthur Brisbane ... but all that I can think of for the moment is that I have lost my friend. ... I grieve for that and realize the loss. ... I grieve inconsolably . . . that the world in which I must spend my few remaining years will hold for me a blank space. . . ."

Hearstwriter Damon Runyon added in all seriousness: "Journalism has lost its all-time No. 1 genius. ... It doesn't seem possible. It doesn't seem possible that with so many Lilliputians of humanity on the face of the globe, this giant has been removed."

The journalistic giant who inspired such awe began his newspaper life early. Son of a well-to-do parlor radical, Albert Brisbane of Buffalo, who paid for space to run a doctrinaire column in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, Arthur Brisbane was educated abroad, mostly by tutors, turned up on the old New York SMI in 1883, aged 19. At that time the SMI thought extraordinarilv well of itself, encouraged its young men to write long "literary" pieces. Thriving young Arthur Brisbane was made the Sun's London correspondent, wrote a famous account of the fight between John L. Sullivan and Champion Charly Mitchell of England, became himself an expert boxer.

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