Stanley Walker

From Philosopedia

Walker, Stanley (21 October 1898 - 25 November 1962)

A newspaperman and author who was born on a ranch northeast of Lampasas, Texas, Walker worked first on the Dallas Morning News, sold several articles about Texas to the New York Herald, then became a reporter for that paper which later became the New York Herald Tribune. In 1926 he became its night editor and in 1928 became its city editor.

Walker wrote The Night Club Era (1933) and City Editor (1934), about the city when celebrities and gangsters alike sought his attention. He became widely known as the author of Mrs. Astor's Horse (1935), which described American celebrities in a cynical way typical of newspapers of the time. He was on the staff of New Yorker, then became managing editor of William Randolph Hearst's gaudy New York Mirror, even writing promotional books for Republican presidential candidates Thomas E. Dewey and Wendell Willkie.

Walker first married Mary Louise Sandefer on 2 January 1923, and they had a daughter and a son. When she died in 1944, he married Ruth Alden Howell 19 January 1946. Allegedly disenchanted with postwar New York City, he left in 1946, writing "Farewell to New York" for the Saturday Evening Post and giving reasons for returning to his ranch in Lampasas instead of enduring the disadvantages of urban life, views that caught the attention of numerous sociologists and individuals concerned about environmental problems. His next two books were Home to Texas (1956) and Texas (1962), in which he told of his disillusionment with politicians and even of the wisdom of democracy itself.

Views

Walker was both dis- and un-interested in religion. As a journalist, he reported disinterestedly. As an individual, he was a freethinker who openly expressed his naturalistic humanism.

Walker wrote The Story of the Dominican Republic and Its People. Also, he wrote Dewey: An American of This Century. In 1995, Walker’s City Editor was cited by The New York Times as one of the best books ever to have been written about New York City. The book was described as follows:

• Some of these wornout gaffers [city editors] pass their old age boring helpless listeners with tales of how good they were in the days when there were giants in journalism. Others putter around in gardens, and the great stories of yesterday, which once were so urgently important and so exciting with life, now seem dim and pale. The memory of the throbbing office—the incessant ringing of the telephones, the daily attempts to keep the office boys awake, the clean inky smell of the fresh editions just off the press, the practical jokes on the office half-wit, the cruse for some cause which at the time was like another Holy War, the parade of freaks and fakers and mountebanks, the complaints and libel suits, the reporters who got drunk and couldn’t write their stories, the campaign to get a $5 a week raise for a deserving reporter with a wife and too many children, the pictures with the wrong captions, the tense speed of election night, the patient drive to instill a few sensible don’ts into the heads of the young men—all grow indistinct and without meaning.

Throughout his life, he was anti-clerical, writing that

• the real enemies of human happiness were the preachers.

To Warren Allen Smith, he agreed to write book reviews for The Humanist, telling him he was a non-believer.

Book Reviewing

Walker wrote reviews in the mid-1950s for Warren Allen Smith, book review editor of The Humanist:

Final Days

Learning that he had a fatal illness, he met friends at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, told them he was dying, and in fact later committeed suicide at his ranch, leaving as survivors his widow and the two children from his first marriage. The Stanley Walker Memorial Award for excellence in reporting is awarded periodically to students in the School of Journalism of the University of Texas at Austin.

{The Handbook of Texas; WAS, 6 May 1957 and 26 April 1958}