Leonard Lyons

Leonard Lyons (10 September 1906 - 7 October 1976) was an American columnist.

Biography

Early life

Lyons was born Leonard Sucher [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,865896,00.html] in New York to a large family of Jewish immigrants from Romania. His father Moses, a tailor, died when he was six. His mother sold cigarettes and candy on the Lower East Side. He graduated from the High School of Commerce which stood where Lincoln Center stands today. He was a classmate of Lou Gehrig and even faced the strapping future Yankee "Iron Horse" in a tackling drill! The next day, Lyons was on the swimming team.

Career

After graduating City College (CCNY) and in the first class of St. John's Law School, he was admitted to the NYState bar in 1929, and practiced law for five years. But he began contributig news items to the newspaper columnists of the day, accumuliating a scrapbook. He also wrote a column called "East of Broadway" for the Jewish Daily Forward's English language page. Then, when the New York Post announced they were looking for a Broadway columnist, he beat out 500 other applicants and won the job. His first column appeared May 20, 1934. The first person Lyons approached as the new columnist of the NY Post was Milton Berle; they became lifelong friends. Over the next forty years--to the day--Lyons wrote six columns a week, 1,000 words a day, covering theater, movies, politics, art and anything else involving anectdotes and news items. He was based in New York, where he covered 13 or 14 restaurants during lunch hours, and the same number of nightclubs, phoning in updated stories late at night to keep his column current and ahead of this competitors. In all, he wrote some 12,000 columns, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Carl Sandberg once said: "If Leonard Lyons had been writing his column during Lincoln's time, we'd really have had a record of what New York was like back then." He travelled the world, sending back columns daily in the pre-Internet years, giving his column to New York-bound travelers with a request they contact the paper upon arrival. It was his rival Walter Winchell who won the contest to name the column. By that time, 1934, Lyons' editor had changed his last name to give him an alliterative name, competing with Winchell. The column, "The Lyons Den" was his entree to "care society,"as it was called back then, and to the inner circles of power. For example, on January 19, 1952, President Truman, a friend, invited Leonard and Sylvia Lyons to dine with him, Bess Truman and daughter Margaret at the White House on their last night. At the start of the meal, Lyons was "appointed" a Federal Judge (he had been a practicing attorney, after all) and Sylvia Ambassador to Mexico. They "resigned" at dessert.

The column became a New York institution, and soon was syndicated. At its height, "The Lyons Den", syndicated by the McNaught Syndicate, was read in more than 100 newspapers worldwide. When he retired on the 40th anniversary of the column, New York Mayor John V. Lindsay invited him to City Hall and presented him with a medal and a proclamation honoring him. On the 100th anniversary of his birth, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued another proclamation in his name. He lived to see "The Lyons Den" used by his son Jeffrey on TV and radio and today his grandson Ben Lyons, the Film Critic for the E! Channel, and the new co-host of TV's "At the Movies" (thus his father's new competitor!) uses "The Lyons Den" as his segment in his Friday night movie reviews on the E!'s "Daily 10" show.

Personal life

Lyons and Sylvia Shoenberger were married in November of 1934. Their marriage would last nearly 42 years and producer four sons: George, a stock broker, Warren, a theatrical producer and singing coach, Jeffrey, now the NBC Film/Theater Critic and co-host of "REEL TALK", and Douglas, a criminal defense attorney and co-author (with brother Jeffrey) of four baseball books.

References

External links

*cite news |url=http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20911F73C59157493CAA9178BD95F428785F9&scp=1&sq=Leonard+Lyons+&st=p |title=LEONARD LYONS DIES; COLUMNIST 40 YEARS; His Anecdotes About Broadway's Notables Were Carried in More Than a Hundred Newspapers|author = Alden Whitman |work=The New York Times |date=8 October 1976