Ambassador from Brooklyn

Brooklyn's Tony Guarino went overseas with strict instructions from his father to be sure to look up his Aunt Theresa in Sorrento--if he happened to be going that way. Aunt Theresa, Father Guarino swore, made the best spaghetti to be found in all Italy.

Tony and his M-7 tank-destroyer crew hit the beach at Salerno with the American forces, and days later helped take Sorrento, knocking out three German tanks. Tony found his aging Aunt Theresa, but not his uncle. The Germans had killed him. Aunt Theresa cooked spaghetti for Tony, his crew and a U.S. correspondent. They agreed that nowhere but in Italy could such spaghetti be found. Aunt Theresa smiled and showed them the box it came in. The label read: Colucci's Famous Spaghetti. Manufactured in Brooklyn, U.S.A.

Quentin Reynolds, the spaghetti-eating correspondent, who is also from Brooklyn, told this colorful tale last week on his radio program, Salute to Youth (NBC, Tues., 7:30 p.m., E.W T.). He recently replaced the show's William L. (They Were Expendable) White as Goodyear's $1,500-a-week coast-to-coast war-story teller.

Friendly Fellow. That Quentin Reynolds has a nose for incident and a lively narrative style has been amply demonstrated since World War II began. Save for a few visits home to the U.S., he has spent most of the war in Europe as Collier's foreign correspondent. As such, he has covered battle actions (e.g., Dieppe), averaged 20 Collier's pieces plus a couple of books a year, moved enthusiasts to call him the Richard Harding Davis of World War II.

He is not. He is a big (220 lb.), friendly, sentimental, high-living, poker-playing ex-sportswriter (New York Evening World, World-Telegram) who has maneuvered his highly flavored personality into the role of an unofficial U.S. ambassador-at-large. A hearty haunter of nightspots, lacking a sharp critical sense or the appetite for one, Reynolds is so confessedly fond of all kinds of people that his Collier's bosses have turned the trait into a shop gag. They say that Reynolds, dispatched to do a story on a big manufacturer, returned to exclaim: "A great guy! A wonderful man!" Home from inter viewing the President of the U.S., he cried: "A great guy! A wonderful man!" Back from interrogating a Jack the Ripper, he foamed: "A great guy! A wonderful man! Boy, how he can cut throats." On at least one occasion, Reynolds' emotional warmth has given him special insight. Unlike some of his U.S. colleagues, he did not, either publicly or privately, write England off the books when the Luftwaffe seemed to have London groggy. His copy exhibited a hot faith in the British capacity to win through and a hot impatience with British censorship, which kept him from telling the whole story as he felt it. He wrote and spoke a commentary for the English documentary film, London Can Take It, which, in brief and quiet fashion, told the U.S. volumes.

When Reynolds broadcast his "Open Letter" to Dr. Goebbels on June 29, 1941, telling him that Britain would stand and that the U.S. would someday stand with her, the correspondent won British hearts as few U.S. citizens ever have. Winston Churchill wrote a letter of thanks. So did thousands of other Englishmen. One admirer gave Reynolds a precious memento--a reproduction of the lantern of Lord Nelson's flagship, Victory, lying in the Portsmouth Navy Yard. Reynolds, thinking it was the original, carried it home by hand, showed it to all and sundry. He had reached Canada before someone pointed out that it was inscribed: "Made in Birmingham, 1917."

The Three Bs. A Bronx-born, Brooklyn-raised, Brown-universitied Irish-American, the nighthawking Reynolds makes himself work by staying home with his clothes off. His persistent itch to go out somewhere has, in its time, cost Collier's plenty. Mused one of the magazine's editors, coming out from under a Reynolds' expense account: "When [it] gets as big as my salary, I'll fire him."

Now 41, and married to Cinemactress Virginia Peine, Reynolds hopes to settle down after the war to a lush Manhattan life of fiction writing. Meanwhile, when his Goodyear contract expires, he intends to go back to Europe. His best contacts and his only consuming hate, Adolf Hitler, are there. The Pacific theater can wait. He has no use for the Japanese, but, being a friendly man, he finds it hard to hate them intimately. "You see," he says, "I've never known a Jap personally."

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