Former Newspaperman, Gene Engalls,
Sold Bibles, Now Sells Real Estate
By Miriam J. Angell
Among Kodiak personalities are
some comparative newcomers to
town who contribute considerable
energy and growth to the com
munity. Gene Ingalls has been here
for about a year; he is associated
with George Cornelious in the
Kodiak - Aleutian Realty Service
and more recently the two
have opened a branch of the Paul
Nichols Investment firm.
We talked to Gene Ingalls this
week because we like him and
know him to have been a news
paperman in the tradition of the
‘boomers’ of the twenties and early
thirties. Boomers were reporters,
editors, shopmen, advertizing and
copy men — all newspapermen,
moving from place to place, rarely
staying in one job longer than it
took to make a reputation and
enough money to take them on to
the next job, another town, another
paper.
There are wonderful legends
about those days and those people.
Though the public had a fairly
universal notion that reporters and
editors did most of their work with
one foot on a brass bar rail and a
permanent bend in either elbow.
This was not entirely true. If he
had a name for knocking around,
all the better, and a certain emin
ence was attached to this, but he
got the news, or the advertizing,
and in the depressed dark days of
the thirties, he had to hustle.
Gene Ingalls said, “For all the
glamour attached to reporters
then they were not as good writers
as they are today. The newspaper
business has stabalized itself. It
used to be, in a way, a bum’s
business, but an interesting bum’s
business—now it’s like a corpora
tion because it has to be.
“Our family came from Texas
but we lived in Oklahoma and
Arkansas too, and Fort Smith,
Arkansas was where I graduated
from high school. After school I
wrapped mail in the back room at
the Times office. The editor was
Colonel Decker, an old type fire
eater who called his oponents al
most anything. It amusees me to
see people get so upset over ed
itorials today; they don’t know
wihat a hot one is until they read
some of the old ones.”
After his freshman year at the
University of Arkansas, Mr. In
galls and his brother sold Bibles in
Western Virginia, and around the
Harlan, Kentucky coal fields. It
paid so well that some young
law grads locked up their offices
for the summer and went on the
road. “This was in ‘27, before the
crash, and there was enough
money around so the customer
didn’t balk at paying $7.85 and up
to $15.00 for a family Bible, but we
had to do a lot of talking. We’d
stand outside and talk a while,
then the people would invite us
in for dinner and we’d talk a little
more and close the sale. Pretty
soon they’d ask us to spend the
night and since we had no other
place to go, we did. We usually
paid for that in coal country. One
day I walked twenty-seven miles
selling my Bibles. We wore yellow
straw hats that were more yellow
after rain and at the end of the
summer my brother and I threw
them away and caught a train
home.
“I didn’t go back to college, but
got a job on the Fort Smith Times
as a police reporter. I worked for
Pat Garner who was the city ed
itor. He took off during the sum
mers to be advance agent for a
carnival circuit, and knew all the
shows. One time Tom Mix came to
town with his horse, Tony, Pat
couldn’t stand Tom Mix. He was
all washed up in pictures when the
talkies came, but he was still very
egotistical. Pat Garner wrote a
column about Tony and in the last
paragraph s^id Tony was accomp
anied by Tom Mix.” Around 1930
Gene Ingalls moved over to the
Daily Oklahoman and covered sec
tional news for them. This was
still, of course, the prohibition era
and politicians and sheriffs ran
more on their records for uphold
ing prohibition than for any other
reason. “The candidate for sheriff
ran for office on how many stills
he could bring in, not how many
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criminals he arrested. Around
campaign time they all wanted
their pictures taken in front of a
row of stills tby the court house.
Gene Angalls
Kodiak-Aleutian
Realty Services
- '
Homes Business
Land Properties
:
Franchised Dealer for
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Sometimes the reporters went on
raids with the sheriff; we went
down to a little town on one oc
asion, looking for beer at one
house. There was an old lady sitt
ing on her porch, churning away
and paying no attention to the law
men. She churned and churned
and the sheriff and undersheriff
looked high and low and couldn’t
find a thing. Finally, the under
sheriff, who carried a cane, lifted
the old woman’s skirt just a bit
and there she was, sitting on two
cases of homemade beer.”
Mr. Ingall’s family was in Hous
ton by then and he left Oklahoma
to join them; he thought he could
get a job easily but he walked the
streets of Houston for six months
before the Chronicle took him on
for three days a week at twelve
dollars a week. Finally cut off from
even that, he became a trainee
with W. T. Grant and Wards, writ
ing advertizing copy. However this
was not much of a living and he
moved on to California and land
ed a job selling advertizing for
the Beverly Hills Citizen, a small
paper for which “I have the warm
est spot of all in my heart. It
couldn’t compete with the Los
Angeles Times or the other large
papers in the advertizing field,
and we were practically starving
to death, but they were the finest
people I have ever worked for. The
best newspaperman I’ve ever
worked for was Charlie Nichol
son, the advertizing manager. He
was an old Scripps Howard man
and now is at the Yakima Re
public Herald. At any rate, we
were hustling advertizing one day
from Thrifty Drug in Los Angeles
and Charlie was getting ready to
make his spiel. All of a sudden he
fell; we thought he was having a
heart attack and I went out of the
room to get him some water. When
I came back, expecting to find
him unconsious or worse, he was
((Continued on Page 15)
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