SOURCE: "Sunny Boy," in Post Biographies of Famous Journalists, edited by John E. Drewry, The University of Georgia Press, 1942, pp. 128-45.

[In the following biographical sketch, McEvoy humorously and affectionately draws a portrait of Guest from glances at his life and verse.]

It takes a heap o' livin in a house t' make it home, . . .

Who wrote that? Does he believe it? And how does he get that way?

The answer to all these questions is Eddie (Edgar A.) Guest. He wrote it because he is Eddie. He wrote it about home because he hardly ever stirs out of it. He wrote it because he believes it; he believes it because he wrote it.

You'd believe it, too, if it had supported you for years, put your son through college, bought you a $50,000 home, sold 1,000,000 copies and made you that rarest thing in history—a prophet with honor in your own country.

I've known Eddie Guest for more than twenty years. In all that time I've never heard so many things that aren't so about anybody. And that is very odd, because an oyster on the half shell is a closed book compared to Eddie Guest. Every day, including Sundays, for thirty-two years he has written a "pome," and practically every one of them is about himself or his family or his friends. More than 300 newspapers told their-readers when Bud cut a tooth, or Nellie cooked a pie, or how the installment collector came and took away the furniture, and yet people still ask, "Who is Eddie Guest?"

Who indeed! Why, so revealing were his daily songs of poverty and personal inefficiency that his mother, her traditional English reticence outraged, would weep and say, "Eddie, have you no shame?" What is he like indeed? My friends, he is just like that. Simple as a child, common as an old shoe, friendly as a puppy, foolish like a fox.

A heap o' sun an' shadder, and ye sometimes have
t' roam
Afore ye really 'precíate the things ye lef
behind, . . .

That's Eddie too. Countless thousands have nodded acquiescence as Eddie, in a voice that would coax a robin out of its nest, painted a picture of far wanderings and glad returnings. To them, Eddie was a world-weary traveler—Eddie, who in his own words "ain't never been nowheres and ain't never seen nothin'." At the age of nine he came straight from England to Detroit. That was forty-seven years ago, and he's been in Detroit ever since. Some lecture trips, to be sure; and last year a session in Hollywood, where he went to be an actor; and one trip to Yucatan on Charles F. Kettering's yacht, during which he wirelessed home every hour on the hour until he landed, and then telephoned Nellie so often that she made him come home to save expenses.

"Without going out-of-doors, one may know the whole world" says Lao-tse, the Old Rogue of China; "without looking out of the window one may see the way of heaven. The further one travels, the less one may know. Thus it is without moving ye shall know; without looking ye shall see; without doing ye shall achieve." There's a lot of the Old Rogue in Eddie. Sitting in Detroit, he has let the world come to him. Without stretching forth his hand, fame, success, riches have tracked him down and forced their vulgar attentions on him. Living in this modern fairyland where the most fabulous dreams have come true, where one played golf with Midas in the morning and poker with Croesus at night, Eddie closed his ears to the siren song. He was a pal of Henry Ford's when Henry was tinkering with his first car. and they used to meet late at night in a little beanery and match pennies to see who would pay for the sandwiches. Eddie's grocer put $1200—all of his savings—into Ford's hands, and Ford bought back the stock for $12,000,000. But Eddie was unmoved. He has never put a dime in any kind of speculation. He knows all the big shots in Detroit and during the boom played golf with many of them. Every day they would greet him with "Well, I made a hundred and fifty thousand dollars this morning," or some such catty remark, but Eddie only smiled and said,

"It don't make any differunce how rich ye get t' be,
How much yer chairs an' tables cost, how great
yer luxury;
It ain't home t' ye, though it be the palace of a king,
Until somehow yer soul is sort o' wrapped round
everything."

Apparently their souls weren't wrapped very tightly around what they had, because they lost it, but when the smoke cleared away and the dust settled, Eddie still had his home and Nellie and Bud and Janet, and a lot of friends. And today his soul is still sort o' wrapped round all of 'em in a double bow knot.

Twenty years is a long time to know anybody, and to find them unchanged in all that time is rare indeed. When they ain't spoiled by success, they're apt to be soured by failure. (He's got me talkin' that way now.) We met first in Chicago at a convention of American Press Humorists—if you can imagine anything so grim. Professional humorists, column conductors, cartoonists, toastmasters—we got together three, four, five times a day, luncheons, breakfasts, teas, dinners. Women's clubs entertained us, and men's clubs, and even the little children didn't escape. All day and far into the night and every day for a week, we went around together and listened to one another's jokes and stories. We started out suspicious of one another, but long before the week was over, our worst suspicions were confirmed. We began hating one another's jokes and stories, and wound up hating one another's collars and hats, hopes and fears, wives and children. But when I tell you that Eddie Guest is the only one who has survived this horror, you will get some idea of his indestructible quality. None of the other visitors could ever come back to Chicago. And we who lived there had to move away, but Eddie has come back many times by special request and has told the same audiences the same stories and recited the same "poems" to them. And they laugh and cry in the same places, and the only difference is that every year they have to pay him more.

Home ain't a place that gold can buy or get up in
a minute; . . .

For a fellow who goes around knocking gold all the time, an amazing amount has managed to cling to Eddie. More than 3,000,000 of his books have been sold at an average of $1.50 apiece, and if you figure 10 per cent of that as Eddie's annual insult—known in the vulgar mart as royalty—it amounts to, what better poets have called a "pretty penny." But then they would know more about pennies than Eddie. Since 1916 his daily "pome" has been syndicated in anywhere from 200 to 300 papers seven times a week. For the last six years he has been on a half-hour radio program, Coast to Coast, every week. His take for that is a thousand bucks on the nose every Tuesday.

When Hollywood started on a hunt for another Will Rogers, it was logical that they would turn to Eddie, the Poet of the People. He told the scouts and lawyers and the producers and everybody that he couldn't go to Hollywood, he couldn't be happy there.

"Afore it's home there's got t' be a heap o' livin'
in it; . . ."

Eddie reminded them mechanically, and they told him he could do a heap o' livin' on $2500 a week, even in Hollywood. But Eddie went right on:

"Within the walls there's got t' be some babies
born, and then
Right there ye've got t' bring 'em up t' women
good, an' men; . . ."

and then he walked out into the yard and started playing with his robins. Well, it takes a heap o' givin' in a place to make it Hollywood, so they followed him right out into the yard and explained that babies are born out West, too, and you could do an awful lot about bringin' "'em up t' women good, an' men" on $3000 a week. So Eddie compromised on $3500, because as he put it himself:

" . . . gradjerly, as time goes on, ye find ye
wouldn't part
With anything they ever used—they've grown into
yer heart:
The old high chairs, the playthings, too, the little
shoes they wore
Ye hoard; an' if you could, ye'd keep the thumb
marks on the door."

There were a lot of thumb marks on Eddie, too, before he got out of Hollywood—but that's another story.

It would seem that Eddie's public is not so indifferent to money as Eddie tells you he is. People either want to know where Eddie gets all his wonderful ideas, or how much of that wonderful dough does he get? Where he gets his ideas is simple enough. He gets them from Eddie. Where he gets the dough is even simpler. He gets it from Eddie's public. But trying to find out how much of it he gets is like trying to learn how many planes in the Soviet air force. You pass out of the realm of reporting into the stratosphere of spy work. However, putting this and that and those together, it is pretty safe to say that Eddie has an annual income of more than $100,000, and has enjoyed this and more for many years, for not only does he collect from radio, the newspapers, movies and books, but he has a tremendous income from greeting cards, calendars, novelties and what the Authors' League painfully refers to as "small rights." Well, they may be small for you and me, but they ain't for Eddie.

Yes, Eddie has an enormous public, and it is not surprising that he has an enormous mail. Eddie's customers love to read and like to write, but occasionally he gets a surprise. Eddie was on the air one night, reciting one of his "pomes" about Nellie, his wife. "When my ship comes in," sighed Eddie in effect, "I will buy Nellie a comb for her hair and a new gingham dress. When my ships comes in," he went on, and his voice trembled with love and tenderness, "I will buy fine gloves for her toilworn hands and new shoes for her weary feet." All over the country, Eddie's audiences wept with emotion, but one of them wrote in and said, "Dear Eddie, I see the Government reports your income last year as $128,000. Don't you think you could spare enough to buy Nellie a comb for her hair? Or, if that is rank extravagance, surely you could manage a pair of new shoes."

Eddie chuckled when he read that one. He knew what the writer didn't know—that this was an old, old "pome," written many years ago, when he and Nellie were living on twenty-five dollars a week in a flat they rented from the cop on the corner. He was writing poetry then on the Detroit Free Press, but his early training was that of a bookkeeper, and every night he used to sit down with Nellie and figure out how far they were running behind.

No matter how they figured, it always came out the same—every week they had a nine-dollar deficit. So Eddie wrote a letter to the publisher, E. D. Stair—he is still the publisher and Eddie is still working on the Detroit Free Press—in which he pointed out that he was steadily losing nine dollars a week, and eventually, at this rate, he would go under. Mr. Stair, in the immemorial manner of newspaper publishers, solved Eddie's problem by raising him three dollars a week. This masterpiece of high financing so dazzled Eddie that he could never break away from Mr. Stair, always went to him for advice, and refers to him today as the smartest businessman he knows.

One is inclined to agree with Eddie when one learns that only after many years did Eddie succeed in getting his salary up to fifty dollars a week, and he was never able to get it any higher. Today, after forty-two years of continuous service, it is lower even, for he was cut during the depression to $37.50, and he has never been put back. However, Eddie never sees the check, although it is collected and faithfully cashed every week. Nellie gets it. Incidentally, Eddie's son, Bud, now a reporter and radio commentator on the Detroit Free Press, got his father's check by mistake one week and was so insulted he almost quit.

Eddie's formal education stopped with one year of high school, but his informal education has been going on ever since. He graduated magna cum laude as a soda jerker and then won a scholarship as an office boy for the Detroit Free Press. Here he mastered in posting baseball scores, providing his own board and tuition out of the weekly grant of $1.50 from the Stair foundation. A fellowship was then offered him in the accounting department, where he occupied the chair of ledger entries, with an honorarium of six dollars weekly. This led to an exchange professorship on the editorial faculty, where his work consisted principally of research in the police stations, supplemented by intensive case studies in abnormal psychology provided by the continuous poker games going on among his associates in the field.

A chair awaited him at the exchange desk—a chair and an eyeshade, a pair of shears and a pot of paste. He read papers from all over the country—big-city dailies, country weeklies—and mined countless little nuggets of wit and wisdom. As Eddie snipped out pieces of poetry to be reprinted, he began to write rhymes of his own and sneak them into the paper as exchange items. Finally he was caught at this, and for one breathless moment, the fate of America's Poet of the People teetered on the brink of oblivion. This was the turning point. After this, Eddie became more daring. He expanded from four-line verses to eight lines, to sixteen. His poetic feet left tracks all over the Detroit Free Press—flat tracks, a lot of them, to be sure, but Eddie was feeling his way.

"Groping blindly" describes it better, perhaps—blindly and desperately—for Eddie knew by this time that he didn't want to grow old and die in the newspaper harness.

"I can't say I planned my life this way," Eddie tells me. "A lot of things have happened to me that I didn't foresee and a lot of things have come my way that I don't deserve, but as I look back, one of the turning points of my life was a funeral. It was a simple enough funeral—just the body and the undertaker and I and a bugler. The bugler was there to blow taps over the grave. It was raining, too, I remember, and the man we were burying had been a newspaperman for forty-five years, and nobody came to the funeral but the undertaker and I, and we buried him in the rain, and then the bugler blew taps, and he was in a hurry because it was raining so hard, and we gave him the five dollars we promised him, and he beat it without even looking back. I said to myself, right there and then, This won't happen to me, if there is any way I can help it.'"

And then I asked him that old bewhiskered question, "To what do you attribute your success?" and he replied, "When I was a child in England, a terrible panic hit everybody, but it knocked us out. I can still see the furniture disappearing, melting away as we sold it for food. Then my father came to this country, looking for work. And he landed in the middle of another panic. Poverty is no fun, and I suppose more than ambition or anything else, the dread of it has kept me trying. That's the secret, I guess. I've always kept trying."

"Don't you believe in luck?"

"The wind usually blows one way or the other," said Eddie, "and if it happens to be blowing your way, that's luck. If it's blowin' against you, you tack. If it stops blowin', you wait until it starts again. But if you aren't out there trving, it won't make any difference which way it blows."

Eddie has been trying for more than forty years, and friends of Eddie who knew him when—Detroit is full of them—say success hasn't changed him a bit. He's still simple and kindly—a small, wiry man who talks with the same drawl and makes the same half-helpless gestures with his hands. Twenty years later, when I met him first, he was still small and slight and dark, and he gave you the impression of being embarrassed to death, unless you looked into his eyes, and then you saw they were keen and twinkling with laughter. I've heard him talk to any number of audiences and he always gives them the impression that they are scaring him stiff.

In his shrewd knowledge of human nature, Eddie is as smart as Will Rogers ever was. To watch him handle an audience is an education in crowd psychology. He tells them a little story that does a lap dissolve into a little "pome" right under their eyes, and before they have finished laughing at the story, they are crying at the verse. They never hear anything that they haven't known since childhood, but it all sounds new when Eddie tells it. At first they feel terribly sorry for him as he shuffles nervously and explains that he really doesn't know why he's there, and he hopes they don't mind if he tells them a little story, because this happened to him that morning—he's been using that same story for thirty years and it's good for thirty more. They feel sorry for him, and then they laugh at him because now they feel so much superior to him—and then they're hooked.

Eddie doesn't lecture very much any more. The women's clubs finally beat him down. Women like Eddie because he makes them cry. Other lecturers would come and try to make them think, but succeeded only in making them feel uncomfortable. But Eddie would stand up there, a pale poetic figure, with his shock of black hair falling into his eyes, his hands making timid, helpless gestures, and in a sobbing cello voice tell them:

"Ye've got t' weep t' make it home, ye've got t'
sit an' sigh . . ."

Years of fighting his way home through crowds of adoring women finally convinced Eddie that he'd rather stay at home. But he still does quite a bit of talking in and around Detroit, and if Nellie didn't protect him, he would be out every night and every afternoon and every morning. Churches—any church—boy scouts, girl scouts, hospitals—Eddie will talk to any of them at any time of the day or night and never charge them a cent. Just the week before I visited him he agreed to go over and talk to the colored Y. W. C. A. one night. It wasn't until he got there that he realized a dreadful mistake had been made. The meeting had been scheduled on the same night as the Joe Louis-Nathan Mann fight, and, horror on horror, his talk was scheduled to start at ten o'clock, when the fight started in New York.

"I watched them getting more net vous," said Eddie, "and finally, sure enough, their worst fears were realized. Just two minutes to ten I was called on, and at ten the radio broadcast was supposed to start from Madison Square Garden. So I got up and said, 'Folks, with the best will in the world, I can't make a fifteen-round talk. Besides, I'm just as anxious to hear about the fight as you are. Suppose we delegate one of our members here to sit by the radio and bring in the results round by round. I'll just go on talking, and you don't have to listen if you don't want to.' So I rambled along and a girl ran in and shouted, 'End of the first round, Joe Louis!' and then I recited the little poem about old-fashioned flowers, 'I love them all, the morning-glories on the wall, the pansies in their patch of shade, the violets stolen from their glade. The bleeding hearts and columbine have long been garden friends of mine, but memory every summer flocks about a clump of hollyhocks,' and the girl runs in and hollers, 'End of the second round, Joe Louis!' So I acknowledged the applause and continued to tell them that 'the bright spots in my life are when the servant quits the place, although that grim disturbance brings a frown to Nellie's face. The week between the old girl's reign and the entry of the new is one that's filled with happiness and comfort through and through. The charm of living's back again, a charm that servants job—I like the home, I like the meals, when Nellie's on the job,' and just then the girl ran in screaming, 'Joe Louis wins by a knockout!' so I didn't have to talk any more that night."

Millions have read Eddie Guest's verses in books and newspapers, more millions have heard his voice on the radio, and hundreds of thousands have seen him on lecture platforms, but only his intimates have seen Eddie at work and Eddie at play—in short, have seen Eddie at home. For home isn't just something Eddie writes about. He lives in it all day every day, and hardly stirs out of it except to play golf, and then he doesn't need to stir far, because his house is right on the edge of the golf course, thirty minutes from the heart of the city. In fact, he and his neighbors live on lots that were cut out of the original tract. The lots were laid out first and then the course, and Eddie can tee off his back porch and play the twelfth hole. Incidentally, he goes around in the low eighties and has shot a seventy-five. Not bad for a poet.

It is a comfortable gracious house with a white column portico and a garden in the back, full of flowers and birdhouses. For the information of housewives who may read this for homely details, there are nine rooms and four baths on the second floor, and on the first floor there are kitchen, dining room, breakfast room, living room, library. The furniture is simple, comfortable and so unobtrusive that if it belongs to any period, style, school or era, it rings no bells in my memory. After two days of lounging, sleeping, eating and sprawling all over the house, I have only a general impression of color and comfort and a lot of outdoors looking in.

In addition to this, I hear a typewriter upstairs. It clicks along for a few minutes and then there is a shuffle of feet on the stair and Eddie comes into the library, looking for Nellie. If she isn't sitting in the corner knitting, he goes around the house looking for her. As soon as he has located her, he seems satisfied, because he goes back upstairs and pecks out two or three more lines of poetry on his battered typewriter. Should Nellie leave the house to shop or visit or go to the hairdresser, Eddie is finished writing for that day. After thirty years, Nellie is still trying to get his hair to lie down, and would like to have him do something about that old velvet jacket he works in. She straightens his little bow tie and takes off his glasses for him when he isn't using them, and tucks them in his pocket, but it's all done so automatically that you know she has done it ten thousand times, and that, though he doesn't notice that she does it, he would miss it if she didn't.

The old velvet house jacket is more than just a working uniform. There's just a slight suspicion of genteel elegance about it which warms Eddie's secret soul—a suggestion of formality which Eddie sternly suppresses in all his other attire. He really likes to wear his tuxedo, but he feels that his public wouldn't understand, so, whenever photographers surprise him in this outfit, he rushes to get an overcoat and puts it on with the collar turned up as though he had just come in from feeding the stock. It is quite possible that Eddie didn't identify himself as a Poet of the People in the beginning, but willy-nilly he was cast in the role, and now the role and the man are so inextricably commingled that it is impossible even for Eddie to know where one begins and the other ends. He reminds you of Frank Bacon in his last years, when he had played Lightnin' Bill Jones so long that Bacon was Jones and Jones was Bacon.

"Does he do all his work at home?" I asked Nellie, because Eddie doesn't want to talk about his work. Nellie says, "Yes, and he's always running up and down the stairs, and some days it takes him all day to write one poem and other days he can write two, but he never gets very far ahead, and after thirty years he is still fighting the dead line. He started to retire at fifty," says Nellie, who has white hair, but a young face, "and he went right to bed to enjoy ill health. The house was full of doctors and none of them could find anything wrong with him, which made Eddie very angry, because he was sure he was falling all to pieces. Well, this went on for at least a year, and then one day I said, 'Eddie, get up. We can't afford to have you retire.' This seemed like good news to Eddie. He got up out of bed, and he hasn't talked about retiring since. I don't think now he'll ever retire."

Ye've got t' sing an' dance fer years, ye've got t'romp an ' play, . . .

Eddie can't carry a tune and, stranger than that for a rhymester, Eddie "aint got rhythm." When I sat with him in the broadcasting station in Chicago while Frankie Masters and his band swung "Mama, That Moon is Here Again," every foot in the studio tapped in time—every foot but Eddie's.

Perhaps he is willing to let his young daughter, Janet, take care of that department. She is just sixteen and she fills the Guest house with all the rhythm it could take without falling apart. Rhythm and boys who come for breakfast and stay for dinner and are finally shooed home. When the boys aren't there, Janet isn't either, for this is a typical American household. She's either at a girl friend's or going to the movies. When Benny Goodman came to Detroit, Janet and her friends took their lunch to the theater, got there for the first show and stayed until the theater closed. They did this every day, until finally they knew all the dialogue of the picture, and the whole theater of youngsters would recite it out loud with the actors. Then Benny Goodman and his band came on, and the kids would truck up and down the aisles and shriek for all the world like a Holy Roller meeting.

I was a guest of the Guests for two days, and I caught one glimpse of Janet. She was having dinner with her gang, after which she was scheduled to leave and spend the night with a girl friend. "Come back for breakfast, dear," said Nellie, but she wasn't back for breakfast, nor luncheon either. When Eddie came down from upstairs, where he had been writing all morning on a poem about home and children, he looked around the table for Janet. "Doesn't she live here any more?" said Eddie plaintively.

The boy, Bud, doesn't live there any more either, but that's only because Eddie built him and his new wife a brand-new house. It's the kind of a house that fathers who didn't have anything when they were young build for their sons. Every day Eddie was over there suggesting new gadgets and getting in the architect's hair. Now that it's finished, Eddie goes over and gloats at least once each day. It has a paneled library nook and a game room with bar downstairs. The garage doors open with an electric eye. The guest room is much too good for any guest—even Eddie. A sweeter, gayer, more complete little chromium-trimmed love-nest you couldn't imagine. But it is all of a piece with the Detroit of today, just as the three-room flat on the second floor of the crossing cop's house where Eddie and Nellie started out was all of a piece with the Detroit of yesterday. The village that was Detroit is a dynamic city now, and Bud is a grown man, making good on the same paper his father started on, and Janet is a young lady who trucks where Nellie, her mother, waltzed—everything and every place and everybody have changed—except Eddie.

It takes a heap o' something to be a hero to your own children. If Eddie is proud of his son, Bud is twice as proud of his father. Not that he has any illusions about his father's poetry. He calls it verse—Eddie thinks most of it isn't even that. "Rhymes, doggerel, anything you like to call it," says Eddie. "I just take simple everyday things that happen to me and figure that they probably happen to a lot of other people, and I make simple rhymes out of 'em, and people seem to like 'em."

"But my father reads everything," Bud tells me proudly, "and his favorite poets are Walt Whitman and Browning," and he adds, "Can you imagine anything more different than Browning and the stuff my father writes? He reads all the modern poets, too, even though he suspects that they don't read him, except to poke fun at him."

"Does he mind?" I inquire, and Bud says "No. Would you? Of course, I think away back there somewhere, it worried him a little bit, but a lot of those who criticized him then are forgotten now, and those who criticize him now aren't read very much, except by each other—and even they seem to mellow as they grow older and have the same kind of troubles that everybody has and find that they can't wisecrack their way out of them."

"I suppose you know your father pretty well?"

"I play golf with him every day when the weather's good and I play poker with him one night a week. You get to know a man that way. In fact, he won't play golf with any other partner but me. I suspect he's afraid I might beat him some day if I played against him. But there's no doubt about the poker. We have a game here at the house every week—mother and dad, Betty—that's my wife—and I, and Betty's father and mother. The blue chips are three cents, the red chips two, and the white chips, one cent, and dad always cleans us out regularly. He does pretty well down at the club, too—that's the Detroit Club. Some of the fellows there play a pretty stiff game and occasionally they coax dad into sitting in. He always tells them he doesn't want to, that he doesn't understand what they're doing, and he has such an honest face that they always believe him. They still think he doesn't know what he's doing, that he's just lucky, but he always takes 'em just the same."

"When I was in college," Bud continues, "I didn't have as much fun as I might have had, because I realized if I got into a jam, it wouldn't be me, but 'Eddie Guest's son.' You have no idea the way a lot of people think of dad, as though he was hardly of this world."

I assured him I could believe it, for only that day Charlie Hughes, secretary of the Detroit Athletic Club, who has known Eddie for thirty-six years, told me the story of a member who came in one morning, all excited, and asked, "Is it true that Eddie Guest is getting a divorce?"

Charlie said, "I hadn't heard of it and I can't imagine it."

"I've got to find out right away," said the member, "because my wife heard it on the train yesterday coming from Chicago, and she cried all night."

Charlie Hughes has a lot of stories about Eddie, but I like especially the one he tells about the motor trip Eddie took with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone. It seems they were riding in a flivver and stopped at a farmhouse upstate for a glass of buttermilk. In the yard the farmer was fighting an old Model T which was tired of it all and wouldn't fight back.

Finally Henry couldn't stand it any longer. He took off his coat and said, "Let me look at it. Maybe I can do something with it."

The farmer didn't think the stranger could, but was willing to let him try. Ford rolled up his sleeves and reached down into the decrepit innards, twisting a muscle here, tying off an artery there. And finally it started to rasp and wheeze, kick off the bedclothes and sit up.

"It'll go now," said Henry, "but when you take it down to the garage, tell them to do such-and-such with it."

The farmer was grateful and wanted to pay. Ford laughed it off and he and his party climbed into their car. The farmer insisted. It would have cost him several dollars to get the car fixed, he argued, and there was no reason why he shouldn't give that money to the stranger.

Finally, to get rid of him, Eddie said, "He doesn't need the money. He has all the money he can possibly use."

"I don't believe it," snorted the farmer cynically. "If that's true, what the hell are you all riding around in that thing for?"

The people who cry when they think of Eddie and Nellie being divorced are the same ones who write indignant letters every week to their local radio stations and protest against the singing of popular songs and the playing of swing music on the same program with their poet-philosopher. If they had their way, it would be all chimes and organ music. How many of them are there?

Last Christmas week an announcement was made to the effect that 100,000 calendars with the picture of Eddie Guest and a facsimile of his signature would be sent to the first 100,000 applicants. Requests poured in by telegraph, special delivery, practically everything but carrier pigeons and dog sleds. When the calendars were exhausted, there were still 250,000 applications, and more were coming by every mail.

How many of them are there?

The Reilly & Lee Co., who publish the Eddie Guest books in stiff board and limp leather, in library editions, pocket editions, and boxed for gifts, tell me that a first printing of an Eddie Guest book of verse is anything from 150,000 down to 100,000. There are twelve titles, and one of them, A Heap o' Livin', has sold more than 1,000,000 copies, and is still selling as strong as ever. I have been able to find only two books that consistently outsell Eddie Guest year after year. One is the Bible, the other is Fannie Farmer's Cook Book. Even the most devout of Eddie's readers would tell you that he combines the best features of each.

How many of them are there? So many who talk so rapturously about him that you grow positively weary trying to add them up.

Here are two real stories out of hundreds that have been told to me. It seems that for years now Eddie has taken the same train out of Detroit every Monday night, occupies the same stateroom, has the same porters, is met at the Twelfth Street station in Chicago by the same redcaps, driven by the same taxi drivers, and his progress from train to hotel, to broadcasting station and back to the train again, is like a triumphal procession. One night there was a new porter on Eddie's car, and Eddie learned that his old porter was ill in a South Side hospital. Now, most men would say, "Isn't that too bad?" and let it go at that. A few might send a note, practically none would send flowers, but Eddie dropped everything and drove out to visit him in the hospital.

The second story has to do with Henry Klein, the hardboiled radio executive who produces Eddie's weekly program. The Kleins built a little house, and they were so proud of it they insisted that Eddie come out and see it. Which he did.

"Where's your garden?" inquired Eddie, and Klein said, "We've done pretty well to get a house. A garden can jolly well wait."

Eddie said he didn't think a house without a garden could possibly amount to much, and went away talking to himself.

'The next day my wife called up," said Klein, telling me the story. "She was having hysterics. 'The WPA is out here,' she said. 'There are trucks full of trees all over the place and they're tearing up the whole yard.'

"I calmed her down by telling her I'd look into it, and then I promptly forgot it. But that night when I got home I passed right by the house without recognizing it. The yard was full of tall trees and flowering shrubs and flower beds in bloom. There was an old turf lawn and roses round the door. It wasn't the WPA; it was just Eddie Guest."

Now, most of Eddie's readers know nothing of rhyme and less of meter, they wouldn't know a pentameter from a speedometer, but Eddie's verse suits them right down to the ground and deep into their very roots. And it is true that many of Eddie's poetic feet have flat arches, and his muse sings less like a heavenly being than the girl next door, and it is true that you could fill Soldier Field tomorrow with contemporary poets and rhymesters and versifiers of all kinds, any and all of whom can write rings around Eddie Guest, but the public, the dear, queer, busy, dizzy, sad, glad public, wouldn't swap one Eddie Guest "pome" for the whole kaboodle.

Why?

Perhaps it is because the bright lads and lassies are so proud of being bright that they can't believe that other people on the road wish they would learn to dim their lights. You can be mighty bright and still not know that you can't put your heart in your work and your tongue in your cheek at the same time. Eddie's heart is in his songs. Small wonder then that his songs go straight to the heart.

Even the roses 'round the porch must blossom
year by year
Afore they 'come a part o' ye, suggestin'
someone dear
Who used t' love 'em long ago, an' trained 'em
jes' t' run
The way they do, so's they would get the early
mornin's sun;
Ye've got t' love each brick an' stone from cellar
up t' dome:
It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home.