I wrote a fight story and sent it out to a pulp magazine that published nothing but fight stories. The magazine was called Knockout. It paid a penny a word.
Two weeks later I received a letter from the editor. I’d always heard how it would go. You’d get a letter from an editor, rip it open, and a check would fall out. Suddenly you’re up on cloud nine. You’ve made it. You’ve been paid for a story you wrote.
I opened the letter and the check fell out. I picked it up and looked at it. It was for fifty-five dollars. A penny a word for a story that had taken me a couple of weeks to sit down and write. I looked at the check and waited to be transported onto cloud nine where I could say I was one of the world’s chosen few.
Nothing happened. I was nailed flat to the floor! A fifty-five dollar check! I handled bigger checks that this in the theater every day. Fifty-five dollars was the payoff for ten years’ work [as a writer]! For all the sweat and tears, yes, and prayers, too! For all the hopes and dreams I’d had. For all the fun I’d missed over the years! Writing was definitely oversold. To hell with it!
Two months later I still felt that terrible disappointment and concentrated on nothing but theater work. One night while waiting for the last show to end so I could lock up the house, I walked across the street to a restaurant for a cup of coffee. They had a huge magazine rack with hundreds of magazines. From force of habit I looked at some of them. There was the magazine I’d sold to. I picked it up and idly ran down the table of contents and there at the bottom, the last story in the magazine, it said Walter Morey.
My first reaction was anger! Somebody had to be using my name! I turned to the story and there was my title, “The Hellman,” with a pen-and-ink illustration of two fighters. And there, too, were the very words that had come out of my typewriter. Then I got the full reaction. It was like being hit with a surprise straight to the chin. To this day I’m not sure I paid for the magazine. But fifty years later, I still have it, dog-eared, torn, patched with tape. I was on cloud nine, for a couple of weeks.
-Written by Walt, published by Something About the Author Autobiography Series, Volume 9, 1990
This is Walt’s actual copy from 1937.
