Oscar Odd McIntyre was a New York newspaper columnist of the 1920s and 1930s.
Background
Oscar Odd McIntyre was born in Plattsburg, Missouri. He was the only son and youngest of three children of Henry Bell McIntyre, a native of Kentucky, and his first wife, Frances Young. The boy's great-grandfather, Duncan McIntyre, had emigrated from Scotland and settled in Gallipolis, Ohio. His father, who managed the village hotel in Plattsburg, was left a widower when young McIntyre was three years old, and the children made their home with their mother's parents on a nearby farm. When Odd he preferred his unusual middle name, given to him for an uncle, who pronounced it "Ud" was about five, he and a surviving sister were taken to Gallipolis to live with their father's mother. In the bustling Ohio river port the country boy developed two lasting attitudes: a small-town sense of inferiority and a keen interest in the simple reactions of people generally.
Education
McIntyre was a poor student at the Gallipolis academy and spent many school days in the solitude of a river-bank cave. But he did prepare and circulate a school paper. Dismissed from school, he worked briefly as a hotel clerk and then began news reporting, first on the Gallipolis Daily Sun and then on the Gallipolis Journal, where he also set type. His stern father broke into Odd's career by ordering the uncertain youth to Bartlett's business college in Cincinnati. He did not complete the course. Neither did he show any promise at the hotel desk back in Plattsburg.
Career
Resuming newspaper work as a reporter on the East Liverpool (Ohio) Morning Tribune (1904 - 05), he was in succession political writer and managing editor of the Dayton Herald (1906) and telegraph editor, city editor, and assistant managing editor of the Cincinnati Post (1907 - 11). In Cincinnati, he won the friendship of the Post's muck-raking editor, Ray Long, who in 1912 called him to New York as associate editor of Hampton's Magazine. The magazine soon went bankrupt, and McIntyre, after a period of unemployment, became a copyreader and dramatic editor on the New York Evening Mail. But spelling and other technicalities of writing plagued him, and he was discharged. At the age of twenty-eight McIntyre decided to go on his own. Relying on publicity writing and free-lancing for a meager income, he began, with his wife's help, in 1912 the production of a daily column about New York for "the home folks, " which he mailed free of charge to selected newspapers. He used it for notices for his publicity clients, but he also described "the big city" as it appeared through the wondering eyes of a newcomer from the rural heartland of the nation who "had never completely grown up". Editors began to print his chatty, informal, name-studded columns with their occasional references to Gallipolis and Plattsburg. By 1914, there were paying subscribers in Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit, and Buffalo, and a mimeograph machine was required. When he became publicity agent for the Hotel Majestic and he and his wife were invited to live there expense free, the McIntyre financial troubles were ended.
As more and more newspapers bought "New York Day by Day, " his "letter" of "highlights and shadows, " he began to dress in accord with his idea of the New York columnist. He work a silk hat and formal clothes after sundown; he collected 200 canes, as many neckties, and 100 pairs of socks. The long-faced writer became a New York figure as he visited the city's familiar places, collected his "thoughts while strolling, " and made notes for his diary. His finished column of 800 words was produced daily in seclusion in his apartment. Meanwhile Mrs. McIntyre relieved him of business affairs, including the contracts with the Scripps-Howard and McNaught syndicates, the last of which brought him almost $200, 000 a year. He described the telescope man at the curb, the chorus girl, and the gangster so as to give each one personality and significance for readers who never saw any of them. He made several trips to Europe, on which he wrote of London and Paris much as he did of New York. A Christian Scientist for the last twenty years of his life, the thin, frail recluse worried about his health, which was undermined apparently by pernicious anemia. He rejected medical attention, talked much of immortality, and, after writing his last column in bed, died of a heart attack in his Park Avenue apartment shortly before his fifty-fourth birthday. Although countless friends and admirers would have attended a memorial service in New York, his funeral was held from "Gatewood, " the old house he owned in Gallipolis, and he was buried in its Mound Hill Cemetery.
Achievements
McIntyre wrote elaborations of his daily columns for Ray Long at Cosmopolitan magazine, and he contributed to other periodicals in addition to publishing four books of his writings: White Light Nights (1924), Twenty-Five Selected Stories (1929), Another "Odd" Book (1932), and The Big Town (1935). McIntyre's rank in journalism is debatable, but there seems no question that to millions of daily readers he was the most widely enjoyed newspaper feature writer of his time. Thanks no little to O. O. McIntyre, Broadway and Main Street became a dual highway.
The O. O. McIntyre Park District in Gallipolis is named in his honor. A Gallia County film production about McIntyre was made in 1994 by Edna Pierce Whiteley. The O. O. McIntyre Story: Chronicle of a Journalist of Note is narrated by Whiteley with Earl Tope as the voice of McIntyre. The film is available as a 30-minute videocassette.
McIntyre wrote, as he said, "not for posterity, " but in the hope of "entertaining people a little every day. " He was a dog lover, and the column that brought him his greatest mail was entitled "To Billy in Dog Heaven". The secret of his wide appeal he appeared eventually in more than 500 daily and Sunday newspapers was that for him the metropolis never lost its thrill.
Connections
On February 18, 1908 McIntyre married Maybelle Hope Small. They had no children.
