W.C.Heniz is the name that a lot of people have not heard.
This is a small summary of him and his life.
The story says that he wrote like an angel.
Please take time to read this.


One of the best writers you never heard of died last week. His name was W.C. Heinz, he was 93 years old, and he lived out his life in a home in Bennington, Vt. It was a nice place, and he sometimes wondered how a writer like him could afford a place like that.
He wrote for the New York Sun.

Heinz's heyday began in the 1940s. Among other publications, he wrote for The New York Sun and for True and the other magazines you used to see in all the barber shops.

Whether he was covering sports or World War II, Heinz wrote like an angel. He did not rely solely on good and sometimes brave reporting, though his work required plenty of that. Without being obtrusive, he let readers in on how events felt to him. He gave them a glimpse, but just a glimpse, of the writer.

A few years ago, we had the privilege of visiting with Heinz. His wife had died, and he was alone. His memory was not quite gone.

He still had the portable Remington typewriter he had carried on the deck of the USS Nevada off Normandy on D-Day. A British courier boat came up alongside the Nevada to collect the day's news copy. You had to put your story in a sack with weights and toss the sack from ship to ship. The weight meant your story had a better chance of reaching its destination, but if you came up short, it went straight to the bottom. That way, it couldn't wind up in enemy hands.

Later he marched with grunts, rode atop tanks and witnessed an execution of German prisoners. The only story the censors spiked was one about bringing in the bodies of GIs. Rather than resent the decision, Heinz came to appreciate it. He and the GIs were fighting the same war, and it wasn't his place to set the rules.

Another Heinz fan, former Monitor reporter Eric Moskowitz, came along to visit that day. He asked Heinz about his most famous lead paragraph. It was on a 1951 story for True about a boxer named Bummy Davis. Heinz's memory cleared. He recited the paragraph almost word for word. It went like this:

"It's a funny thing about people. People will hate a guy all his life for what he is, but the minute he dies for it they make him out a hero and they go around saying that maybe he wasn't such a bad guy after all because he sure was willing to go the distance for whatever he believed or whatever he was."

For most of our visit, Heinz seemed unable to remember how he had struck it rich. He wrote two novels, but neither was a bestseller. He ghosted a book for Vince Lombardi, but there was no big payoff in that either.

Over lunch, something jogged his memory. It was M*A*S*H - "That's where the money came from!"

Sure enough, he collaborated with a Maine surgeon, H. Richard Hornberger, in writing Hornberger's memoir of the Korean War. The book, the movie, the TV series - "The royalty checks just kept getting bigger year after year," Heinz said.

Virtue is seldom thus rewarded in this world. Bill Heinz deserves to be remembered for his words, not his bankroll, but it's nice to know good things can happen to an ink-stained wretch.

Two paperback anthologies collect the best of Heinz's sports writing - What a Time It Was (2001) - and war correspondence - When We Were One (2003). If you can't find them locally, you can order them through abebooks.com.