FLOYD GIBBONS FLOORED THE ACCELERATOR and sent his open-top Studebaker speeding down the country road while spitting gypsum rocks like bullets from a Tommy gun. When the roadster hit its top range at sixty-five miles per hour, he reached over and punched a button on the new mechanical contraption those whiz boys at the NBC studios had rigged up under the dashboard for him. A thin metal cylinder began spinning in the wooden box that sat on the passenger floorboard, and his own voice began speaking back at him through a large round speaker bolted above the gearbox.
Clicking a stopwatch, he started counting the words in the recorded dispatch that he had filed ten years ago while covering the Russian famine:
"They were the backwash of the war—people who were uprooted from their homes and farms as early as 1914, and who since then had been walking from place to place with all their belongings on their backs and now they were dragging empty sacks, stomachs and pockets through this land of want."
His lone eye flitted back and forth from the road to the stopwatch:
"A boy of twelve, with a face of sixty, was carrying a six-month-old infant wrapped in a flighty bundle of furs. He deposited the baby under a freight car, crawled after him and drew from a pocket some dried fish heads, which he chewed ravenously and then, bringing the baby’s lips to his, he transferred the sticky white paste of the half-masticated fish scales and bones to the infant’s mouth as the mother bird feeds her young."
He clicked the stopwatch again as the last sentence of the recording whizzed to a finish. Two hundred and twenty-one words a minute. Not bad, but still twenty-five under his best. In radio, time was money, and the correspondent who could cram the most words into a minute of airtime would always be in high demand.
He leaned back in his leather seat and tried to stop worrying about the state of the world, a reflex that he had never come close to perfecting. During the twelve years since the war, he had rushed all over the globe, covering the Polish-Russian and Moroccan wars, crossing the Sahara desert to interview Arab sheiks, riding up the Niger River to Timbuktu, and island-hopping in the West Indies. This was his first real vacation in a decade, and he had decided to spend it taking a road trip to Yellowstone Park and visiting some of the country he had covered as a young newshawk.
He passed another farm truck groaning under a haul of stacked furniture. The farther out of Chicago he got, the more itinerant families he was encountering. Some sat stranded along the highway, clustering together in their misery in tents and shacks. Others insisted on traveling alone, clinging to what pathetic independence they could manage in a last gasp for dignity. He had never expected to see anything in America approaching the destitution in Russia, but the situation out here in the heartland was getting too damn familiar for comfort. He glanced at the rearview mirror and watched the rattling jalopy snort steam from its radiator. Unable to let it fade out of sight, he braked to a stop and shifted into reverse. He backtracked even again with the wheeled beast of burden and waved the driver down. Flicking away the dust, he pulled out his money clip, peeled off two bills, and reached the cash through his opened window.
The haggard-looking man behind the wheel shook his head. “I can’t take your charity, mister.”
“Not charity at all,” Gibbons said. “I was admiring that chair you got strapped on your bumper. I’ve been looking for one like that for years.”
“Why that old thing ain’t worth the kindling.”
“You fight in the war?”
“How’d you know?
“I could tell by the way you roll that rig around the berms,” Gibbons said. “Worst drivers I ever saw were in the Army.”
In the rear bed of the truck, four freckle-faced boys raised their heads up like dragon’s teeth through the mangle of strapped-down furniture. The oldest leaned over the side and yelled a discovery, “Pa, that’s the Headline Hunter!”
The sharecropper and his wife, an emaciated sparrow who would have made Old Mother Hubbard appear youthful, took a closer inspection of the generous stranger. They looked as if they’d just been hit with frying pans.
Gibbons broke the grin of a gangster caught red-handed at the bank vault. He wagged a finger of warning at the star-struck boy who had pegged him, “Don’t be too sure, son. A lot of people are running around this country posturing as the Headline Hunter. Why, last month they caught a fellow down in Florida wearing an eye patch and talking fast while claiming to be the radioman. Turned out he was just crazy.”
The father reached his arm across to shake hands with fame. “We used to listen to you every Saturday night. Until …”
“We had to sell the radio,” his wife explained.
Gibbons pulled another bill from his clip and gave it to her. “I can’t be losing loyal listeners. You get yourself a new Zenith down at the Montgomery Ward.”
The oldest son climbed atop cab’s roof. “Mr. Gibbons, tell us that story again how you went walking that day with President Coolidge.”
“Now Tom,” the mother scolded. “Mr. Gibbons doesn’t want to be bothered.”
Gibbons removed his straw panama hat to rub his rugged scalp. “Let me see if I can remember it now. Oh, yeah. So, old Cal invited me over for one of his evening strolls down Pennsylvania Avenue before he turned in for bed at seven. Now, mind you, I’m the only newsman ever to be honored with such an invitation. Hoover doesn’t even walk with his own advisors, let alone with ink-stained hacks.”
Entertained, the boy slapped at his thigh as if pounding mites from a quilt. “Heck, Mr. Gibbons, you’re more important to us than any of them politicians! You’re the only one who tells us the truth!”
“Tom!” his mother admonished. “Have respect for our government leaders.”
Gibbons gave a thumb’s up to the woman’s patriotism. “Old Cal wasn’t much of a talker. We must have covered five blocks before he said, ‘Nice crisp weather.’ I tried to get the conversation stoked with a description of my excursions in Africa, but after ten minutes, all he asked me again was, ‘You there, and when?’
“What’dja tell him, Mr. Gibbons?” the son asked.
“At that very moment, I was about to cross the street when a taxicab came flying by on my blind side. Silent Cal yanked me back to the sidewalk, just in the nick.”
“Praise Heaven!” the mother ejaculated.
Gibbons nodded at the sentiment. “I guess sometimes I get to spouting my ideas so fast, I forget my surroundings. If I hadn’t been ambling with the president that day, I probably wouldn’t be here conversing with you. Heck of a thing if I’d dodged all those bullets over the years just to be felled by a motor vehicle in the nation’s capital.”
The mother fanned her heated cheeks with her hand. “Lord, we could use Mr. Coolidge back there now.”
Gibbons returned his hat to its perch and tipped its brim. “Here’s hoping for an easier road up ahead for you good folks.”
“Tom, pull that chair down for Mr. Gibbons,” the mother ordered.
Gibbons held the boy at bay with a palm. “Where you all headed?
“Boise,” the father said. “If the patch on this carburetor holds out.”
“I’d be obliged if you could transport the heirloom up there for me.” Gibbons pointed to his rear seat, which was filled with boxes of his books and fan letters. “I don’t have much room left in this fancy tin can the sponsors make me drive. I’ll catch up with you down the road.”
“God bless you, Floyd Gibbons!” the mother cried, fighting back tears.
As the truck chugged off leaving a miasma of gas fumes and steam, young Tom, perched atop the cab, waved goodbye and hollered, “Signing off, Headline Hunter!”
Gibbons sat watching the dust from their bald tires spiral over the horizon like a twister. He didn’t have the heart to tell those poor folks that they had heard the last of his Headline Hunter broadcasts, for NBC, at least. The sponsor of that show, the Literary Digest magazine, had canceled him after he turned up drunk at the home of the company’s teetotaling president one night with a couple of speakeasy ladies on his arms. Seemed hilarious at the time, but in retrospect, it might not have been such a great career move.
He really didn’t give a damn. Hell, he still had plenty of other radio shows and sponsors. His schedule was booked for two years with speaking engagements regaling crowds on his travels and exploits that led to his several books. Still, it burned him that he was the first newsman ever to be required to sign a morality clause in his contract. He had finally relented, but only after insisting on his own clause promising that he would never be forced to undergo facial surgery to beautify his war-worn looks.
And nobody, not even NBC and those Prohibition do-gooders, would ever take away the moniker by which he was known to millions.
No sir, he would always be the Headline Hunter.
He toasted that certainty with another swig of Four Roses bourbon from his flask, and then he headed back down the gypsum track. When he got up to cruising speed, he turned the dial on the dash radio until he found the voice of Lowell Thomas, the reporter that NBC had hired to replace him. That poor boy sounded downright nervous as he expounded on the pros and cons of Hoover’s latest economic boondoggle.
He grinned, remembering his own first week on the air. He never had gotten over that sickly feeling right before a broadcast. His throat would go dry and his pulse would soar, and he’d be convinced that he was slipping into a hallucination, recreating in his mind’s eyes the remarkable events he had witnessed. He was still just an old newspaperman at heart. Sure, he had made his big fame on the airwaves, but no print columnist was ever tossed out on his ass for keeping the bourbon business from going under. Radio sponsors were demanding too much power these days. It wouldn’t be long before the suits on the top floors started censoring stories to avoid offending the mothers who bought their soap and soda water.
One upside of it was, if his lone eye ever gave out—and there’d been some recent scares—he’d still have the fastest voice in the business.
ANOTHER HOUR UP THE ROAD, he spied a gathering of tents in an open field. A banner on poles invited motorists to Stop Here at Farley’s Carnival Show. Like every author, he was incapable of passing up a chance to sell a few books. And like every man with a little kid inside him, he wouldn’t be denied a circus. Besides, he hadn’t had a good sausage dog since he had watched Walter Johnson throw flames out here years ago.
He pulled to the side and parked. Always prepared for such occasions, he unlocked the trunk and rifled through his tried-and-true array of disguises. He decided on the Red Baron this time: aviator goggles, soft-leather helmet, long red scarf, and a khaki pilot’s jacket. After confirming his anonymity in the reflection of the windowpane, he walked into the fair as if one of the Wright brothers had just flown in for some cotton candy. He strolled incognito down the midway, guessing the fat lady’s weight and throwing baseballs at milk bottles glued to shelves.
A few minutes into his tour of American low culture, he caught sight of a candy stand on the periphery of the fair grounds. There, standing on a block of wood, loomed a slim man about six-foot-four, clad in a silk top hat and black dress coat with tails. The fellow was barking at customers in a fervent effort to sucker them toward his array of delectable treats. Every so often, the prairie giant would lean out over the gawkers at such a severe angle that he seemed to defy the laws of nature.
Gibbons sauntered closer to this anti-gravity maestro and saw that passersby were being offered a chance to try their hand at winning a box of Choward's Violet Mints by guessing the digits drawn from a rotating basket of numbered cork balls. After observing the cork balls pop up for nearly a minute, he puzzled over the fact that the crowd seemed to be winning more than losing.
What kind of half-baked carny scam was this, anyway?
His journalistic instincts were firing. He walked closer, intent on discovering the trick behind this illusion. He circled the stand and caught a fleeting glimpse of the exposed back of the block elevating the barker. To his delight, he saw the answer to the mystery: the con man had rigged up a pair of shoes with metal plates that kept his cuff-covered heels attached to the block. Below the block, a pug hound lay guarding his master’s secret.
A memory synapse in his brain fired.
He threw a pebble at the dog’s hind leg, and when the hawker wasn’t looking, whistled the dog over and whispered to it’s ear: “Is that you, Scrapper?”
A lapping tongue to his cheek confirmed his suspicion.
With his eye patch hidden behind his goggles, he walked around the barker’s stand and threaded the crowd that was watching this leaning tower of baloney’s act. He rang up his loud radio voice and yelled, “I’ll put twenty dollars on number twenty-six!”
The audience gasped at that princely sum.
The tilting barker nearly bit his lip. “That’s a hefty wager, sir. We’d have to see evidence of your bona fides.”
Gibbons pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and waved it for all to see.
“Any reason you’d pick that number?” the barker inquired.
Gibbons wiped two fingers across his goggles like windshield wipers. “My brother flew recon for the Forty-Second Division. He told me the worst damn fighting unit in the whole war was the Twenty-Sixth Yankee Division. Bunch of East Coast dandies, he called them. Couldn’t aim a howitzer if the target was strapped to the mouth of the barrel. I figure that number’s due to come up since it had such a poor run of luck in France.”
The barker frowned as he peered down into the crowd, trying to place the head behind the goggles. “This is a free country, Lindbergh. Go ahead and bet your crop-dusting wages and lose them, if you’re so inclined.”
“On one condition.”
The barker was fast becoming annoyed. “We don’t let the customers set the conditions, sir.”
“Not even for twenty bucks? That’s more than most folks make in a week.”
“What is your request, then?”
Gibbons held out the money at arm’s length, as if dangling a dog biscuit. “You come down here and get it from me.”
The barker appeared nonplussed by the challenge. “That’s not necessary. Just hand the legal tender to my assistant over there.”
“A hundred dollars! If you come shake my hand for it.”
“Now, look, Wilbur. Why don’t you run along back to your dirigible?”
The audience turned and eyed the barker suspiciously, questioning why he wouldn’t descend from his perch to take the easy cash.
Gibbons removed his goggles and helmet.
The crowd squealed with sudden recognition. “It’s the Headline Hunter!” shouted a dozen voices in the crowd. “The One-Eyed Knight of the Airwaves!”
Gibbons raised his arms like a ringleader as he strutted in front of the barker’s block. “Ladies and gentlemen! Today I shall demonstrate a feat of magic never before seen in the Western Hemisphere. With one swipe of my mortal hand, I, a human Cyclops, shall produce before you the youngest general ever to have fought with the famous American Expeditionary Force.”
He walked up to the barker and tore off the man’s fake beard.
Happy Glassford stood exposed, his identity revealed to the astonished bumpkins. His ruse revealed, the West Pointer sheepishly stepped out of his bolted shoes. In his socks, he loped over with a wide grin and put the newsman’s neck in a friendly arm lock in retaliation. “By God, Gibbons, what the hell are you doing here?”
Gibbons bowed to accept the accolades of his adoring public. “I was about to ask you the same thing, General.”
“I’m a major now. The brass knocked me down a couple notches.”
“Happened to the best of them after the war. Even MacArthur lost a star. I heard ol’ Black Jack had to run him down and rip it from his shirt.”
Swarmed by the fairgoers, Gibbons climbed atop the wooden block. “Folks, I’m going to renew an acquaintance with my old Army friend here. But if you’ll all show up at those grandstands in an hour, I’ll regale you with the story of how this tall drink of West Point water invented the Glassford Trench Mortar during the great Marne offensive!”
While the crowd applauded eagerly, Gibbons slipped an arm over Glassford’s shoulder and whispered, “Any place a man can get a wee sampling of the local branch-water malt around here?”
“Sorry to say, but Iowa is a dry state. Like the rest of the country, in case you haven’t heard.”
Gibbons flashed the flask that he kept hidden in his pocket. “Then we’ll have to temporarily secede from the Union.” As they walked behind the tents sharing the flask, he asked his old friend, “I’m not against dishonest work, Hap, but seriously. What’s this circus gig all about?”
Glassford shrugged. “I guess I’ve been a little at loose ends since the war. I tried ranching in Arizona, but that didn’t work out. Then my father died. I was pretty down in the dumps for a while. There’s not much call for an old soldier these days. I thought I’d pull up tracks and try the itinerant life for a few months.”
“How’s the painting going?”
“I’ve sold a few pieces.”
“You let me know if you ever finish any good nudes.”
They enjoyed a good laugh, and Gibbons waited for his friend to come clean with the reason for traveling with this circus. When the former officer refused to spill the beans, Gibbons edged closer. “Shouldn’t you be in Washington right now?”
“Washington? Why would I want to go back to that cesspool?”
Gibbons looked at him quizzically. “You wouldn’t be playing possum with an old newspaperman, would you?”
“I don’t have a notion of what you’re talking about.”
“When was the last time you saw General Crosby?”
Glassford thought for a moment. “I ran into him a few months ago back East while I was helping put together the VFW Jubilee.”
“You’d better get your bags packed and the cow manure scraped from your boots.”
“Why?”
Gibbons looked around for prying ears. “You didn’t hear it from me, but Crosby’s going to offer you the police chief’s job for the District of Columbia.”
Glassford stopped in his tracks. “Some of those boys at Fort Myer put you up to this prank, didn’t they?”
Gibbons raised his palm as if swearing an oath. “I’m as serious as Herbert Hoover in a church full of nuns.”
“Off the record, you can take this to the bank. I’m no police chief. Never will be.”
“You should think about it,” Gibbons said. “Sometimes a man’s destiny can come at him blind from the flank.”
“Yeah?”
Gibbons nodded as he took another swig. “One night in Chicago a few years ago, I was feeling low about losing my mother. It was my first Christmas without her, and I was home on leave. The night editor at the WGN radio station asked me to fill in for a Christmas Eve cancellation. He interviewed me about my travels, and I guess I got a little misty-eyed about all the far-flung places I’d spent Christmas. Next thing I know, the station is getting inundated with fan mail, and NBC hires me. I was convinced that I was no radio commentator, but I took a chance. Maybe you should, too.”
Glassford laughed and waved off the pep talk. “Police chief? Never gonna happen. But if it did, the first order I’d hand down would be to ban you from all press briefings.”
Gibbons played hurt; then, he winked and promised, “The only thing crazier than you taking that job is me covering City Hall in Washington.”