Floyd Gibbons
Reporter, Chicago Tribune
The supreme example of the amoral
reporter in pursuit of an assignment. To beat the opposition, he had no
second’s thought about breaking the law, taking an axe to a telegraph
line, defying a city fire brigade, booking himself onto a ship likely to
be sunk by the Germans so he could report its torpedoing, out-bluffing the
leadership of the Soviet Union, and sporting medals from dog shows to
impersonate a war hero. He survived nine wars, two air crashes, a major
shipwreck, being shot at by seven different armies, being bombed by four
air forces, and encounters with less formal threats such as Pancho Villa
and his desperados, and the Japanese secret service. And all this, for the
most part, equipped with only one eye, the other one being sacrificed when
he was 31 in pursuit of yet another exclusive.
And he could write. After wangling his
way into Russia to become the first Westerner to witness the Great Famine
of 1921, his story included the following: “A boy of 12 with a face of
sixty was carrying a six-month-old infant wrapped in a filthy bundle of
furs. He deposited the baby under a freight car, crawled after him and
drew from his pocket some dried fish-heads, which he chewed ravenously and
then, bringing the baby’s lips to his, transferred the sticky white
paste of half-masticated fish-scales and bones to the infant’s mouth as
a mother bird feeds her young.”
When Gibbons got to the local telegraph
station, he saw that the keyboard used to transmit messages had, naturally
enough, only Cyrillic letters. He had to write out his report again,
changing each Latin letter to its nearest local equivalent. So, in this
hybrid language, was his report transmitted to Moscow where a colleague
translated it and despatched it Chicagowards. Once again, Gibbons got the
story out.
