"...ALL LIFE IS 6 TO 5 AGAINST"

Today is the birthday of, amongst other writers, Damon Runyon. From the The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of the man who said, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong — but that is the way to bet." That's fiction writer and journalist Damon Runyon, (books by this author) born Alfred Damon Runyan in Manhattan, Kansas (1880). His mother died when he was young, and his three sisters grew up with various family members in Kansas. But young Alfred Damon was raised in Pueblo, Colorado, by his dad, who was a gambler, an alcoholic, a literature enthusiast, and a newspaperman.

The boy was kicked out of school in sixth grade for "excessive horseplay" and got a job for his dad's newspaper. By the age of 15, he was recognized as beyond his years in both his writing ability and his ability to drink and chain-smoke. He met all kinds of characters, and he wrote about them for the newspaper and also in his short stories. He spent a few years traveling around and working for papers, and one of them misspelled his last name as "Runyon" instead of "Runyan," so he decided to go with it.

In the olden days, that was the proper way to make a newspaperman. Each time I think of the reason given for Runyon's expulsion from school, "excessive horseplay", I burst out laughing.

He himself was an enthusiastic gambler, and he found other gamblers, as well as con men, mobsters, prostitutes, hustlers, and boxers. He made friends with these outsiders, and he spent his nights with them, fitting in easily with their lifestyle even though he had more or less given up drinking after moving to New York, sticking to coffee and cigarettes instead. It was said that he would drink 40 cups of coffee to stay up all night, and then show up for work at the newspaper in the late afternoon looking fresh and clean.
....

He said, "I long ago came to the conclusion that all life is 6 to 5 against."

Also, in the olden days, not a few newspapermen led similar lives to Runyon's, and those who wrote for newspapers were not treated with the extreme deference as the members of the top tier today. The opinion writers and reporters of the most prominent newspapers and the national TV news talking heads and pundits often hobnob with the high and the mighty in in positions of power in government, business, and lobbying. They attend the same dinner parties and cocktail parties and then claim to write unbiased stories and opinions about those same people.

However, certain opinion writers and reporters in the top tier are outstanding exceptions to the above description, and I highly respect their work. The less prominent writers and reporters and those on the local scene still work at their jobs.

Read the rest of Runyon's short biography at the website.

I thank Cathy and other friends for sending me links to the website and urging me to sign up for the feed to the "Today's Poem" feature.

Today's poem is "Small Boats" by Steve Kowit.

Picture from Wikipedia.