Tales about newspaper men, and booze

Some folks are excited about the new possibility of buying wine in a supermarket. This would puzzle citizens of many more enlightened states. Those of us who grew up with the State Store system don’t think it’s odd, but those from outof-town seem to find it hard to grasp.

Back in the 1950s, there was a television series called “The Big Story.” Each week, it dramatized a true account of a newspaper reporter who helped police somewhere solve a crime.

Once, Nate Kleger, a reporter from the Philadelphia Bulletin, was a chosen subject. Researchers from the TV show came to town to interview people and study the city. A few background scenes were filmed here, though most were done in New York, some in a studio.

One February evening in 1956, we drudges of the Bulletin night staff gathered around the newsroom TV to watch the show. It was reasonably realistic, although the actor who played Nate was young and handsome, and Nate was in his forties and (if his family will forgive me) a bit homely.

The backgrounds looked like Philly, the police cars and uniforms seemed authentic, and everything was fine until a shared guffaw went up from our newsroom audience. There was TV’s Nate, on a supposed Philadelphia street, standing in front of a shop with a neon-tube sign in it that said “LI- QUOR.”

In those days, many newspaper reporters could remember Prohibition. They had plenty of tales to tell about the days when Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick brought in rough-andr eady Marine Corps Gen. Smedley D. Butler to lead the police in battling illegal liquor sales.

Butler took the job seriously and horrified the mayor by doing things like shutting down the Ritz Carlton and Bellevue-Stratford for selling liquor. He lasted only two years.

Old-time reporters told a favorite, possibly true, yarn about Butler and booze. In 1925, one of the first ever live radio broadcasts of a football game was made of a game between the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University.

One of the reporters from the city’s newspapers working that Saturday in the reporters’ room in City Hall, room 619, brought in a radio. He also brought a long single-wire antenna, a necessity for radios in those days.

The wire was strung across the room. The signal was weak, and somebody suggested putting the radio on the window sill and hanging the antenna out the window, which overlooked the City Hall courtyard.

The reception was good there, but there was static when the antenna wire blew around. It needed a weight on the end. Someone found the very thing in a desk drawer: an empty whiskey bottle. It was tied to the antenna, and lowered out the window.

The reporters didn’t know that the bottle was dangling just outside the upper part of Smedley Butler’s office window below. Neither did Gen. Butler; his back was to it.

Then, some women arrived from the thoroughly anti-alcohol Women’s Christian Temperance Union, for a meeting with the general. They were horrified to see the evil container hanging outside.

So was Butler. He sent some of his rugged cops upstairs. They smashed in the door to Room 619 (though it wasn’t locked) and confiscated radio, antenna and bottle.

For some 30 years, before it was finally replaced, reporters showed the repaired scars on the door to Room 619 and told that story. Visit columnist Jim Smart’s website at jamessmartsphiladelphia.com.