The Mysterious Montague by Leigh Montville

Author:Leigh Montville
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385526715
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-05-06T04:00:00+00:00

The next public sighting of John Montague/LaVerne Moore—except for a brief gossip item that he was spotted at the Rainbow Room in New York City—did not come until ten days later in Elizabethtown, where he had to enter a plea on September 7,1937. One of the people waiting for him was Henry McLemore.

Thirty years old, McLemore was already the lead sports columnist for the United Press, a deft and often cynical writer, his words from New York pumped around the country under column heads that read “Today’s Sport Parade” or “Henry McLemore’s Parade of Sports” or “Henry McLemore Says.” He was originally from Macon, Georgia, an Emory University graduate, one of the new generation walking in the footsteps of Grantland Rice.

Though he had become friends with Rice—since everybody became friends with Rice—he had a zany quality that Rice never had. He often told how his first job in the newspaper business was writing editorials for the Ku Klux Klan, not exactly his favorite organization, during the 1928 election. His best Klan editorial detailed how the pope was already planning to build a tunnel underneath the Atlantic Ocean from the Vatican to the White House if Democrat Al Smith, the Catholic, became president. Not true, perhaps, but an inspired thought.

He had a tendency to put himself into the middle of the action, usually after a couple of cocktails for literary inspiration. At the 1932 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, for example, he wound up at the bobsled run at Mount Von Hoevenberg at midnight with a trained black bear and one of the Stevens brothers, a member of the U.S. two-man bobsled team. The Stevens brother had claimed, after some cocktails, that he and the bear could beat the world two-man record. Why not see? McLemore, the Stevens brother, and the bear had broken into the course in the dark.

McLemore stood at the finish line with a stopwatch. The Stevens brother shouted from the top and he and the bear took off. On the first turn, the Stevens brother driving, the bear fell off the back. The Stevens brother kept zipping down the course in the bobsled, now without a brakeman. The bear kept zipping along the course in quick pursuit, not in the bobsled and howling all the way. McLemore at the finish clocked Stevens at two-tenths of a second under the world record. The bear, missing a big patch of fur on his backside, tied the world record.

At the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin, after more cocktails, more inspiration, McLemore was apprehended late at night by the Gestapo as he climbed the wall of Adolf Hitler’s residence, singing, “Is It True What They Say About Hitler?”—a parody of the popular song “Is It True What They Say About Dixie?” He told his captors that he was simply having fun, that he didn’t even know which building he was climbing, that it was all a misunderstanding. He was released in time to write a scathing column about the German leader

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