Gene Sherman (reporter)

Gene Sherman
Born	Eugene Franklin Sherman 1915
Died	1969
Occupation	Newspaper reporter and columnist
Employer	Los Angeles Times
Awards	Pulitzer Prize for Public Service

Gene Sherman (1915–1969) was a journalist who won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the Los Angeles Times.^[1] Sherman started his 30 years on staff as a cub reporter covering nearly all the regular news beats from police and sheriff to municipal and Superior Courts. He then worked as a rewrite man, a frontline general assignment reporter, leading feature story writer, war correspondent, in-depth investigative reporter and a foreign correspondent. He became a daily general interest writer of his page-2 column Cityside for seven years and a roving national and international assignment reporter. In 1964 he opened the London bureau as part of the Los Angeles Times bid to widen its editorial base into a national newspaper, rivaling the influence and impact of The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Cub and crime reporter

Eugene Franklin Sherman was born in Oak Park, Illinois, to Eugene Watts Sherman, a statistician at a stock broker company, and Juliette Louvre, daughter of a lace manufacturer in Calais, France. When Gene was 4 years old, the Shermans moved to Los Angeles. While at Loyola High School, aged 15 years, he worked as assistant editor and reporter for the Boulevard Record and Compton News Tribune community newspapers. Sherman graduated from L.A. High School, followed by a year at the University of Southern California. In 1936 he took advantage of new cub reporter openings at the Los Angeles Times to join the pre-eminent West Coast newspaper.

During the Ben Hecht "Front Page" era of big-scoop headlines, Sherman wrote articles ranging from the zoot suit gangs of Los Angeles to the annual New Year Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California, as well as high-profile crimes and courtroom trials picked up by newspapers across country. He covered the rise and fall of Southern California hoodlum Mickey Cohen, a one-time protégé of Al Capone in Chicago. Cohen took center stage of West Coast crime syndicate operations and with a fearless, strong-arm flamboyance held sway over the flashy Los Angeles-Hollywood celebrity crime scene in the 1940s and 50s.

Mickey Cohen

Sherman covered many stories involving Mickey Cohen, including at least three inter-gang revenge killing attempts, an ineffective bombing of Cohen’s Brentwood fortress house, and shootouts on public streets. At 4:00 a.m. on July 20, 1949, two assassins opened fire in front of Sherry’s café on Sunset Strip in Hollywood, striking Cohen in the right shoulder and wounding two men and a woman. They were rushed to the Hollywood Receiving Hospital; Cohen ended up at the Queen of Angels Hospital. The morning edition of the Los Angeles Times hours later reported the shooting, page 1. The next day, on page 5, Cohen was photographed in a hospital bed. Three police sergeants and a deputy stood bedside to question Cohen about the assault. Special agent bodyguard Harry Cooper, shot twice in the abdomen, had been assigned to Cohen by State Attorney General Fred Howser for protection because the upstart underworld mob leader expressed fear "that Eastern gangsters" were there to assassinate him. Cohen, who owned a haberdashery in Hollywood, had become known as "the dapper racketeer," "the gambling kingpin," "the dapper mobster." He professed surprise to the police at the barrage of bullets: "Some sort of gang war is being investigated. But that’s all news to me. I don’t know anything about it, and I’m in close touch with the East. Talk back there three or four times a day."

Dorothy McLaughlin, who happened to be an older sister of Sherman’s wife Genevieve, was Head Nurse of the large Queen of Angels Hospital and assigned to care for the notorious, celebrity gangster. Had Cohen discovered she was an "insider" he would have been very angry; Sherman had interviewed him several times before and never forgot what Cohen once said—"I never killed a man who didn’t deserve it."

As it was, when Sherman arrived at the hospital to cover the latest gangland shooting, Cohen asked him, "How much money you got on you?"

Sherman thumbed through his wallet. "$7.00."

"Will you loan it to me?"

Gene handed over the money, which was returned later as a cellophane-wrapped box of chocolates for Sherman’s sister-in-law.

Mickey Cohen was convicted twice of tax evasion in 1950 and 1961; he served a total 11 years behind bars, including at Alcatraz. He died in his sleep from stomach cancer in 1976.

Errol Flynn and Charlie Chaplin

In 1943, Sherman covered the sensational statutory rape trial of movie star Errol Flynn. Jerry Giesler, a high-profile courtroom lawyer and Hollywood’s favorite defense attorney, deliberately selected a nearly all-women jury. The case centered around two minors, Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee, who accused Flynn of raping each of them in two different locations (at a party and on Flynn's yacht 'Sirocco' during a trip to Catalina Island 22 miles off the Southern California coastline). Giesler, known as "The Magnificent Mouthpiece," played up the confusion of their testimonies; Flynn was acquitted by the nine-women, three-men jury.

A year later in March, Sherman covered the controversial paternity suit against limelight actor Charlie Chaplin. Again, Jerry Giesler took the defense. Joan Berry, an ingénue protégé of the internationally famous actor, accused Chaplin of fathering her 14-month-old baby Carol Ann Berry. The trial captured world-wide headlines and captivated readers with daily installments of the Charlie Chaplin "sex serial," one of the many alluring trials firing up the scandal-loving Forties and Fifties. Sherman led off his report on the tumultuous you-are-there verdict this way:

Straight from a movie script came the final scene in The Trial. Melodramatic and jammed with suspense, it was a vivid tableau of wild emotion. No courtroom epic, hatched in the warm typewriter of a hack scenarist, possibly could have outdone the real-life Charlie Chaplin denouement—complete with spontaneous cheering above the frenetic rapping of the bailiff’s gavel.

Utter confusion followed the reading of the "not guilty" verdict. Spectators pushed and jostled their way through the gates of the railing and swarmed around the glassy-eyed Chaplin as a horde of photographers clambered over the furniture clicking shutters with abandon.

The courtroom became a cauldron of humanity—jury, spectators, prosecution, defense, court attachés and newsmen melting into a bubbling,

boiling stew of confusion.

The proceedings ended with a mistrial when negative blood tests, in a courtroom maneuver, were ruled inadmissible as evidence.

Black Dahlia Case and the Overell Case

Sherman also covered the nationally reported "Black Dahlia" case of the unsolved, January 14, 1947, murder of Elizabeth Short, a beautiful, 22-year-old, aspiring Hollywood actress. Later the same year, he covered the sensational Santa Ana, California, murder trial of 17-year-old Beulah Louise Overell and 20-year-old accomplice Bud Gollum, both accused of killing and dynamiting Overell's wealthy Flintridge parents. Courtroom testimony was broadcast live by the Mutual Broadcast System to a vast, cross-country audience. Sherman followed the trial day-by-day for four and a half months. On the day the verdict was expected, Sherman stationed a copy boy around the clock inside a courthouse telephone booth. When the couple was acquitted in the longest American murder trial to date, Sherman ran to the "Times" phone booth and scooped the other papers.

Pacific war correspondent

In 1944, Sherman went into the Pacific Theatre as a uniformed war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He was accredited to the Marines, Army and Navy. His signature column Pacific Echoes and news articles datelined from Guam, Manila, Leyte, Ormoc, Guadalcanal, Muntinupa, Honolulu, Brisbane were cable teletyped to the Los Angeles Times office. Other reports placed him "With the 40th Division on Luzon" and aboard ocean vessels from Landing Ship Tankers (LSTs) to hospital ships and the Headquarters Ship. He described the "fearful beauty of a night air raid" on Okinawa and covered the invasion of Peleliu where, he reported, the fighting was worse than at Guadalcanal.

Sherman wrote in his Pacific Echoes column, "Two other correspondents and I were chased across the open field by a sniper and mortar fire. I saw one red shell pass between us, knee high." On Oct. 12, 1944, CBS Radio war correspondent Webley Edwards cabled the Los Angeles Times editorial room to say that the last time he saw Sherman was just out of a water-filled foxhole pinned down by enemy fire for 48 hours.

In April 1945, Los Angeles Times reporter Kyle Palmer tracked down Sherman embedded with the 7th Division on Okinawa and wrote that he was "dug in but dirty, dusty, unshaven, and looked altogether disreputable—a condition he shared with 99.44 per cent of the lads."

Many correspondents with newspapers, newsmagazines, radio and film companies covered the Southwest Pacific forces of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur and his invasion of the Philippines. The War Department accredited 500 reporters to cover the four warfare theatres—European, Mediterranean, Indo-China and the Pacific. Sherman was one of them and his stories were published in "delayed dispatches" from the front lines toward the end of the war. Of 54 war correspondents killed during the Second World War, 25 died in the Pacific Theatre. Scripps-Howard correspondent Ernie Pyle, the most famous, was killed by sniper fire on Li Shima of the Philippine Islands on April 18, 1945. He was the last correspondent killed in WWII.

Sherman wrote about the war for other publications besides the Los Angeles Times. In his article Distance—America’s Second Enemy for Douglas Airview, (Douglas Airview Co.), he told of taking the control stick of a C-54 Skymaster for a couple hundred miles on the Leyte, Philippine Islands, route (after two minutes of pilot instruction).

In The Lockheed Star (Lockheed Aircraft Corp.), he confessed to losing the battle of words when it came to war. "I thought I had a pretty fair idea of what war was like. Well, I didn’t even have the faintest idea of what war was. Words and pictures and imagination are failures when it comes to war. They just can’t do the job."

But, he added, "it is important, I think, for people to try and try and try to know what war is like, to know what it means to lie on your belly in deep mud while shrapnel sings over you; to cringe in a rain-filled foxhole while mortar shells burst nearer and nearer; to stay awake all night on the ground because you’re afraid of a bayonet in your back."

One time he heard a voice behind him say, as he was stepping over a poncho-covered heap, "Hey, Mac, watch that dead Marine."

These things make you suddenly understand war, he wrote: "The acrid smell of cordite, the smell of charred bodies, the sound of big guns and their shells cracking overhead, the spit of rockets, the ping of snipers’ rifles—they all help, too. If you had been on Leyte—which I’m glad you weren’t—you might have noticed a few young Filipino mothers huddling close to the ground and holding suckling babes to their breasts. And surely you would have understood a little better if you had seen the weary men of the Seventh Army Division marching along the road to Dagami, their faces a mask of being tired. You would have understood a little better when the warning went along the column: ‘Enemy planes five minutes away.’ You would have known that here was a perfect strafing target and you would have understood as you watched their faces when the P-38 Lightnings wheeled over at last and their faces changed ever so slightly because these men were too tired to cheer. You know what I think of war? I think it’s stupid. I think it stinks. But I know, as you do, that trying to understand ‘what those boys are going through out there’ might help bring victory sooner."

Founder/President—L.A. Press Club

After WWII, Gene and seven other newsmen met in spring 1946 to talk about a press club for Los Angeles. At the time, few press clubs had organized beyond the Milwaukee Press Club, the oldest established in 1885, or the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., begun in 1908. The New York Press Club was formed in 1948 and others started decades later. The first Los Angeles Press Club began shortly after 1900, continuing through the Great Depression in the 1930s and weakening further by World War II until finally ceasing.

The camaraderie of wartime, the return of overseas war correspondents with supportive peaceful times, and the need for newsmen and newswomen to get together fed the enthusiasm to re-inaugurate an L.A. press club. The Greater Los Angeles Press Club was founded formally on September 24, 1946.

In print, Sherman was known as a brilliant writer and admired reporter; in person, genial and creative. Colleagues called him "an ace reporter," "a reporter’s reporter." He was elected founder-president.

The other founders and directors organizing the club included Clarence R. Newman (Examiner), vice-chairman; Jack Cravens (Daily News) secretary; Judson Smith (Herald-Express) treasurer plus Marvin Miles (Times); Joseph Sedana (Daily News); Sid Hughes (Examiner) and B.L. Means (Herald-Express). In the September 1947 issue of the Eight Ball Newsletter (v.1, n.1) Gene wrote, "Only an idea, a common goal, held them together—The Greater Los Angeles Press Club."

At the time, the name Los Angeles Press Club referred to a nightclub, now long gone. The press club has "repossessed" the original name.

President Truman

Less than a year after the Club re-organization, 800 guests attended Opening Night at the Case Hotel on June 13, 1947. On the first anniversary of the Greater Los Angeles Press Club, June 14, 1948, more than 1,050 people packed the Ambassador’s Coconut Grove to see and hear campaigning President Harry Truman cut a giant birthday cake for the occasion. This was the first time a Los Angeles audience saw a U.S. President telecast live. Comedian Red Skelton reported that Congress was "playing bingo with billions," Kathryn Grayson sang the national anthem, and Dinah Shore sang "You Made Me Love You." Seated at the President’s table with Genevieve and Gene Sherman were Bess and President Truman, their daughter Margaret Truman, 6th Army Commander General Mark W. Clark, 12th Air Force Commander Major General Glenn O. Barcus, Rear-Admiral 11th Naval District Commandant B.H. Bieri, Los Angeles Times President and Publisher Norman Chandler, National Press Club President Joseph W. Short, Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron and California Lt. Gov. Goodwin J. Knight.

Eyewitness reporter of first A-Bomb tests

In 1953 Sherman covered the first 12 atomic bomb test series at Yucca Flat, Nevada, and was one of six reporters who volunteered to witness a nuclear explosion in an open trench less than two miles from ground zero.

One of the first historic explosions code-named Annie sparked this eyewitness dispatch: "The murky dawn light was suddenly gone from our trench, washed out by the indefinable, unbelievable brilliance of the atomic flash. Under my nose the dull powdered sand of the trench turned an unworldly white. Simultaneously, the earth we embraced so dependently convulsed in violent paroxysm. We were shaken like dice in a cup for brief, fleeting moments of terror."

Following an earlier, rescheduled explosion, Sherman wrote a long narrative about a bomb test that did not explode as planned. Dr. John C. Clark, who climbed the 300-foot explosion tower with two other test scientists, disconnected basic detonation wires of what they called "the gadget." They climbed back down and returned to the "firing" control room 10 miles away. The bomb was rescheduled to test explode five days later; the flash was seen in Los Angeles 375 miles away. The public never heard of this heroic, harrowing episode. When Sherman asked why the first story had been spiked, the editor said, "Because the bomb didn’t go off."

Roving reporter

Sherman’s beat continued to expand after WWII. In 1950 Chiang Kai-shek and his followers of the Chinese Nationalist Republic government moved onto the island of Taiwan (Formosa) as a result of the civil war with the Chinese Communist Party of Mao Zedong. On March 25 and 26, 1951, The Los Angeles Times ran "exclusive interviews" with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and Mme. Chiang in Taipei, Formosa, as part of a long series of eyewitness reports from the Far East.

Chiang Kai-shek

"The 64-year-old leader drummed his fingers nervously on the mahogany arm on his chair as he talked," Sherman wrote. "He gazed reflectively out a large window across a fishpond outside and into the China skies. He smiled only when he greeted and left his guest."

Chiang told Sherman he fully understood that the people of the United States had two questions in mind—whether his troops would fight and win and whether his government had the support of the people. He knew that the United States—or a segment of the United States— felt allegiance to his cause because he was the best that Americans had against Communism in the Far East. Chiang Kai-shek must win American support; there was nothing else.

American-educated Mme. Chiang added: "We do not want your manpower. We do not want anyone to fight our battles for us. But we have here the means to defeat Communism in China. Why shouldn’t it be used?"

Over the ensuing years, the hope that U.S. support of the Chinese Republic would lead to the return of Chiang Kai-shek to the China Mainland never gained sufficient American backing to prevent the unrelenting growth of the Chinese Communists. Despite periodic revivals of plans to return to the Mainland, Chiang Kai-shek maintained his Presidency of the Chinese Republic on Taiwan until his death in 1975.

National and international

Sherman covered many events that took him to Europe, South America, the Middle East, Africa, Scandinavia, Asia, the Arctic Circle, the South Pacific, the Caribbean. These assignments included front-page stories ranging in complexity from a two-part series on Castro's Cuba to the Beatles of London, the rubber plantations in South America, a 19-part series on China, the elaborate state funeral of British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, the peacetime tactical submarine war games in the mid-Pacific, the crises in the Congo Republic.

In the early 1950s he was awarded four commendations for "Best News Writing" and "Best Feature Writing" from the journalism fraternity Theta Sigma Phi.

Sherman's coverage of Cuban refugees in Miami led to a beat on plans leading to the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961. A year before, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had initiated a plan to overthrow the Cuban government. The plan was held in abeyance during the 1960 Presidential election. After being elected, President John F. Kennedy proceeded with the plan; it turned into a series of disastrous miscalculations and a humiliating national failure.

In September 1962 Sherman covered the story of James Meredith when armed U.S. Marshals were sent to protect him as he tried to enroll in the segregated University of Mississippi at Oxford. Sherman also uncovered the smuggling of Haitians into the Bahamas and wrote eyewitness reports of the three voting rights marches in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

Using background events and information gleaned from these assignments, he wrote numerous op-ed page commentaries for the Los Angeles Times over the 1950s and 60s.

Commentator on radio, TV, and other media

In 1957, Sherman played a bit part in the film Jeanne Eagels as a reporter interviewing Eagels, played by Hollywood star Kim Novak.

Angeltown

In his popular Cityside column, Sherman lobbied for a Los Angeles theme song in the vein of New York, New York and Gary, Indiana. In 1959, he enlisted Academy Award winning songwriters Jay Livingston and Ray Evans (Mona Lisa, Buttons and Bows, Que Sera, Sera) to write Angeltown. By August, the pop music magazine Billboard ran the notice: "They Said It Couldn’t Be Done Dept.: Los Angeles will now have its own anthem." Single recordings were produced by the Horace Heidt Orchestra with singer Bob Grabeau and the Bob Thompson Orchestra and chorus.

In his August 21, 1959, Cityside column, Sherman toasted the "Angeltown" success during a rousing community inaugural at a Los Angeles Press Club dinner. During the same evening, conductor Johnny Boudreau led the North American Male Chorus version of Angeltown as part of half-time entertainment at the Los Angeles Rams and Washington Redskins football game in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The following evening, the Lawrence Welk Television Show hosted the Lennon Sisters singing an up-tempo version.

The sheet music cover touted Angeltown as a "Descriptive rouser about Los Angeles. Official song of the city."

In addition to writing for the news magazine Fortnight for five years, Sherman’s articles appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Pathfinder, This Month, Saturday Review, Readers Digest, Coronet and other publications. For 13 years, he wrote The Looking Glass weekly column for the Los Angeles archdiocesan newspaper The Tidings. The National Catholic Press in 1959 judged him "Best Columnist" for his home-life vignettes, and he was elected president of the Catholic Press Council.

Under the pen-name Dick Kidson, Sherman wrote an "editorial advertisement" column in the Los Angeles Times from 1961-1967 for the upscale Farmers Market complex, a large marketplace of specialty shops in Los Angeles that since 1934 had developed into a chic sightseer destination.

In 1959, the hard-working, fast-living Sherman also hosted his own nightly 60-minute Channel 9 KHJ-TV Los Angeles interview program. From 1962-64 he wrote and broadcast a daily 15-minute current affairs commentary program on KABC Radio in Southern California. In London, England, during 1965-67, he delivered political background broadcasts for the BBC External Service.

Investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner

Over the decades Gene Sherman became expert at gathering news, assessing the reliability of sources, and using the right word. He was nominated twice for a Pulitzer Prize, then won in 1960.^[1]

In the late 1950s for the Los Angeles Times he worked solo on an in-depth investigation of cross-border drug trafficking into the United States. Sherman spent 18 months researching, traveling, interviewing and writing his primary assignment of the 8-part series Mexican Monkey On Our Back.

The series covered the illicit drug smuggling from Mexico through the seedy border portals of Tijuana and Mexicali. He wrote about go-between cab drivers, poppy fields for heroin, marijuana farms, the five biggest dealers (four Mexican, one Chinese), a 17-year-old American kid with needle marks on his forearm from shooting up two grams twice a day, and other heroin and marijuana users and dealers. From among his sources, many threatening if not dangerous, he gathered a broad spectrum of material from addicted prostitutes, U.S. law enforcement officers, medical doctors, defense attorneys, prosecutors, U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics Harry Anslinger, Dr. Laurence Kolb, chief of mental hygiene for the U.S. Public Health Service, one of the few who spoke of narcotics addiction as an illness, not a crime.

Sherman probed the street-savvy axiom that "addicts are created by other addicts," that one addict is responsible for 4-6 others’ use of heroin. He tracked the steps of how the money involved in drug dealing could turn one ounce of pure heroin at $400 cut 10 times into a retail street value of, at that time, $11,640.

"This series," he wrote in conclusion, "has avoided embracing one viewpoint to the exclusion of all others, of quoting one authority as final. If it has emphasized somewhat the magnitude of the narcotics problem and the importance Mexico plays in it for Southern California, it has served its purpose."

Today such editorial commitment by major newspapers in support of a single reporter working for a year and a half on a broad, in-depth investigative series is rare.

Pulitzer citation

The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, considered the "Grand Prize" of the Pulitzers, is the most prestigious of the 21 categories of the Pulitzers and the only one accompanied by a Gold Medal. The Pulitzer Citation that Sherman won for the Los Angeles Times reads:^[1]

For its thorough, sustained and well-conceived attack on narcotics traffic and the enterprising reporting of Gene Sherman, which led to the opening of negotiations between the United States and Mexico to halt the flow of illegal drugs into southern California and other border states.

References

1. "Public Service". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2013-10-26.

1. Obituary. Los Angeles Times, Part II Editorials, March 6, 1969.
2. Atomic Bomb tests. Collier’s, August 9, 1952, pp. 17–19.
3. Biography. (Los Angeles Times, in-house), December 24, 1963. 2 pp.
4. Mexican Monkey On Our Back (8-part series reprint). Qc 178.8 S553m, 13 pp. 1960. California State Library.
5. Angeltown, Livingston and Evans, sheet music.
6. LA Press Club history
7. "Pacific Echoes," Los Angeles Times, War reports column. 1944-1945.
8. "Cityside" column, Los Angeles Times., p. 2 Part 1, September 7, 1958.
9. Pulitzer Prize citation, 1960.
10. Lockheed Star, December 29, 1944, p. 2.
11. Douglas Airview, April 1945, p. 27.
12. -30- : 54 war correspondent killed in WWII
13. Press Club opening. LATimes. p. A3, June 14, 1947.
14. Mickey Cohen. "California: Clay Pigeon." TIME, August 1, 1949.