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Whether in New York or Miami, Winchell keeps close check on geography of significant news spots.
Commentator at work : Winchell types all his own scripts, never a secretary.
Walter Winchell is beard Sunday evenings at 9 P.M. EST on ABC stations, sponsored by Richard Hudnut Products.
Johnson, thirty-six, from Chicago arrived in Miami last night. Has internal hemorrhage and trying to locate Type A, Rh-negative blood. None in blood bank. Cannot locate any since this afternoon. If anyone in Florida has this type blood — Type A, Rh-negative — please help a dying man. Urgent."
That finished, he went on with his broadcast. At the sign-off he walked out of the quiet of the studio into bedlam. Every phone in the place was shrieking, people were dashing from desk to desk and the direct wire teletype was ringing frantically. Walter picked up the yellow strip of paper unwinding from the machine.
"Attention WW! Phones in New York going wild. Seventyfive calls in less than five minutes. Ringing like mad in ABC offices across country. Have you got the blood yet? Can't turn down donors until we're sure the man is saved . . ."
Two hours later Winchell, looking flustered and with a suspicious moisture in his eyes, went on the air again. He told Mr. and Mrs. America that they could relax now, stop clogging phone lines into ABC affiliates across the United States. "We've learned," he said, "that a man chartered a plane from Augusta, Georgia. Eastern Airlines offered to delay all southbound planes in New York in case someone found the right blood. More than three hundred persons are at the hospital now and Miami police have been called to straighten out traffic jams on roads leading to Biscayne Hospital.'
"Flash! The stricken man has received the transfusion and is responding. The donor had just been identified. Nathan Dash — a visitor from New York."
He had to add: "Nobody asked, 'Is he black, white, brown or yellow?' Nobody said anything, just: 1 have that type blood and I want to help — ' "
As he drove back home to the Roney Plaza Hotel on the Beach that night, Walter really had the Christmas spirit. He could be glad in his heart that he'd been in Miami tonight.
A man's life had been saved, indirectly, because several years before Winchell had looked out of his New York hotel window into a sleet storm and decided on the instant to go where the sun was. He followed it to Miami, and thereafter pursued it to its Southern hideaway every autumn, returning to New York only when the trees were budding in Central Park and the tulips were planted, already abloom, in Rockefeller Center.
Winchell spends five months of (Continued on page 78)
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