Up from the Ivy League

Edwin A. (for Aloysius) Lahey is a stubby, rumpled Chicago Daily News correspondent who is one of the top U.S. labor reporters. Some colleagues go even farther. New York Timesman Meyer Berger, who is often called the best U.S. reporter, says: "Ed Lahey is the best reporter in America." Next week, Reporter Lahey, 53, will take over from Veteran Paul R. (for Roscoe) Leach, 65, who is retiring as head of the Washington bureau for John S. Knight's Chicago Daily News and the other Knight newspapers (the Detroit Free Press, Akron Beacon-Journal, Miami Herald, Charlotte Observer).

Although Ed Lahey has been assigned to Knight's Washington bureau for 15 years, he has steadfastly resisted the occupational urge to become a pundit. "I don't know anything duller than an expert," says Lahey. "I have constantly striven for superficiality. The best stories are written by guys who don't know anything about the subject. A kid who goes in cold to cover a labor convention may make it sing." Because of his own talent for going in cold to tackle a top story, Ed Lahey, who calls himself a "paid free lancer," has roved the world in recent years on top stories, e.g., early attempts to depose Peron in Argentina this year, Guatemala's anti-Communist uprising in 1954, and South Africa's explosive racial tension.

On the labor beat, Lahey has often scooped stay-at-home competitors with such stories as his disclosure in 1953 that the A.F.L.'s Martin Durkin was resigning as Eisenhower's first Labor Secretary.

Hundred Proof. A West Side Chicago machinist's son, Ed Lahey went to work at 14 as an office boy, later was a shipping clerk, hod carrier and railroad yard clerk before he landed his first newspaper job in 1927, on the now defunct Glen Ellyn, Ill. weekly Beacon. Two years later, after reporting stints with the East St. Louis Journal and the Associated Press, Lahey was hired by the Chicago Daily News, "the only paper I ever wanted to work for."

On the News. Reporter Lahey soon became known to most of the cops and crooks, bigwigs and bartenders in the city. He earned a reputation as a 100-proof character, in the softhearted, hard-drinking Front Page tradition, who could also turn out a neat story. When "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn was killed in a South Side shooting match, Lahey wrote a sympathetic obituary in which he mentioned that the mobster had a weakness for golf and had bragged of qualifying for an Open tournament. At the end came the dash of bitters. "Jack was killed last night," wrote Lahey. "He died in the low Eighties," i.e., on the lower South Side.

Bum with Funds. In 1936, after Lahey's barroom prowess had turned into, a city-room problem, he crawled out of Coventry by volunteering for his first labor assignment, a story on the C.I.O.'s newly formed Steel Workers Organizing Committee. The story was so good that Ed Lahey became the News's labor authority. "Anyone who goes out on a labor story and doesn't fall flat on his face," says Lahey deprecatingly, "becomes, quote a labor expert, unquote." Nevertheless, Expert Lahey combined human interest and fair-minded interpretation to such good effect in covering the 1937 steel and auto sitdown strikes that he was assigned to top labor stories throughout the U.S., became a close friend of union leaders.

As a member of the first group of Nieman Fellows at Harvard in 1938, Reporter Lahey used the year to round out his scant formal education and "cure the worst damn inferiority complex about college you ever saw." Salty Ed Lahey became a hit with the faculty, was cultivated by Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard Law School professor, and other faculty members who delighted in the newsman's flair for deflating campus stuffed shirts. When a notoriously long-winded instructor finally wound up his lecture one day, Ed Lahey inquired slyly: "Would you mind summarizing that last point in 10,000 words?" To another intellectual, who thought he was talking over Lahey's head, Lahey once cracked: "Ah, Shakespeare! I'm nuts about him. I read everything he writes, as fast as it comes out."

Sobered by his brush with the Ivy

League, Ed Lahey joined Alcoholics Anonymous in 1940, now uses up surplus energy by playing bridge, the piano and the horses. Each winter, after saving a half-dollar at a time all year, Lahey sets off for Miami with a $400 stake for a two-week horseplaying binge. Last week, in mid-vacation, the horses were $40 ahead. Sighed Lahey: "It's the perfect vacation, knowing your money must be spent improvidently. I feel like a bum with funds."

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