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IT'S NEVER TOO LATE
By LESTER GOTTLIEB
THIS is a short short story of a big man who refused to quit. If the reading time of it was comparable to the long hours Gabriel Heatter spent alone, patiently awaiting the "breaks," this could well be a competitor of "Anthony Adverse." Today Gabe is at the top of the heap, after skyrocketing to fame over the Mutual network, with his vivid radio reporting of the news of the world. But it was a long road with plenty of detours.
Gabe was born of average middle-class parents in New York. His father was superintendent of a clothing factory, an industry noted for seasonal unemployment. When his father was out of work, young Gabe would pester hard-boiled city editors for night work. He got odd jobs, but his ideals of journalism were temporarily smashed. The sixteen-yearold lad dreamed of foreign correspondents' adventures in war-inflamed Europe, like those he read in the Times by Walter Duranty, of "I Write as I Please" fame. He hoped to cover city politics and expose corrupt politicians. Instead he was assigned to church socials and women's bridge clubs.
But Gabe didn't give up, though the years crept up amazingly fast and he knew he wasn't getting anywhere in particular. Somehow the
well-known breaks played hookey from the Heatter household, which now included a wife and two children. No longer did he attend church socials, but he still got no further in his journalistic career than Hoboken. The job of editing a steel trade journal was the best he could do, until he took pen in hand and wrote an open letter to Norman Thomas, Socialist leader, which appeared in the Nation magazine.
So impressed with this letter was a smaller New York radio station that it invited Thomas and his unknown assailant to talk it out over the air. To Thomas it was a routine invitation. To Gabe Heatter it was his first escape from the stuffy steel trade journal; a temporary release from mediocrity.
"I've still got plenty of time for fame, I'm only forty," he said to himself in front of the bedroom mirror. He pulled up his belt vigorously and patted down his steel gray hair.
"I'm not as young as Lanny Ross or as handsome as
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GABRIEL HEATTER HAS PROVED THAT LIFE DOES
BEGIN AT FORTY— AT LEAST FOR NEWSCASTERS
Frank Parker, but I've got just as much fight as they have." At least someone heard the debate, for the next day a prospective sponsor called the station and asked if the man who waged Norman Thomas a brilliant battle of words was available for radio work.
HIS work on these programs prompted his sponsor to take more air time on WOR. Then came the horrible Lindbergh tragedy and Gabe was assigned to broadcast from Flemington three times a day. The blue-eyed, square-jawed Heatter made many radio friends in the tiny New Jersey town, but he also gained a flock of friendly enemies.
Gabe knew this assignment was his big chance — perhaps his last opportunity to rise to the top. He kept his typewriter clattering incessantly from six in the morning until broadcast time, rewriting, cutting, editing and relighting stale cigars. The newspaper reporters who had finished their stints early in the morning, were hitting the hay for wellearned sleep. They were rudely interrupted by the bang