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WHEN LOUIS Sobol, one time Broadway columnist for the Hearstnewspapers, died Feb. 9, he was 90 years old and almost the last survivor of an era in journalism when typing out gossip about celebrities could make a celebrity of the tattler. In his time, Sobol had his share of that fame, but the time was so long gone that, on the obituary pages, the notices of his passing were not much longer than a column item.
The skimpy send-off could be read actually as the obituary of the branch of newspapering he represented. It was less a dismissal of Sobol, who probably deserved more, than of the journalism of name-dropping which, from the 1920s to the outbreak of television, made powers and personages out of those who practiced the game. They came, they reigned, they disappeared. Fifty years ago, a Hopi goatherd might have known the name and writings of Walter Winchell, but look him up in the Columbia One-Volume Encyclopedia - which with amazing comprehensiveness records almost everybody who left a mark on his or her time - and he is among the missing.
This is probably surprising only to those who are old enough to remember what widely reverberating fanfare came out of the tin horns of the chroniclers of New York nite life (as they usually spelled it) in the three or four decades of their heyday. Without them, the farm boy who lacked the money for a ticket to feed his fantasies at the movies would also have lacked the spur to enterprise that came of knowing there was a glamorous city out yonder where there were chorus girls to be chased. The unemployed of the Great Depression would have gone hungrier to their beds for not knowing which Broadway leading man was seen dining on veal Orloff the previous night with which Cafe Society divorcee.
The writers who provided this service didn't go unrewarded for what they contributed to society. Winchell transferred his rat-a-tat style and cream-of-the-shlepperati personality to Sunday night radio. He appeared in Hollywood movies. When television came along, weakening the power of newsprint on many fronts, Ed Sullivan, a second-string Winchell,...