Charles Guthrie
1903 to 1977
Tribune
Retired June 1970
"I worked with him..."
Chick Guthrie and I were car pool partners for 17 years, during which time I developed a huge affection for him, a circumstance which probably disqualifies me as an unprejudiced observer of his performance at the Tribune, from 1944 to 1970.
During those years we exchanged insults continually, and we finally agreed that if one of us were ever asked to write a valedictory for the other, we would title it, "I worked with him (the lazy loafer)." Well, the insults were all in fun and I can now reveal that Chick was really a gentleman and a scholar, though he would undoubtedly resent my saying so, modest fellow that he was.
Let us pass over quickly Chick's high competence as an editorial writer and makeup editor who assembled each day's editorial page with unfailing skill. Let us charitably forget the time he backed his car over a house guest's suitcase as he prepared to drive that now visibly shaken gentleman to the airport. Let us not recall, either , the three distraught weeks when Guthrie searched for his missing hat and finally found that I had been wearing it all the time, due to a horrendous mixup.
For Chick's most remarkable talents were as a columnist. His weekly Tribune pieces were sometimes faked by one of his precocious grandchildren. He created an acerbic character named Picklewurst whom many persons suspected was Guthrie's alter ego. In his column, Chick often exposed his family to kindly goldfish-bowl treatment, including his patient and adoring wife, Florence. Whether he wrote about peanut butter or his early preference for a straight-edge razor or his boyhood days in Montana, Chick emerged as the homey sort who captivated countless readers, the majority of whom were apparently women.
What was Guthrie really like, they would ask. Well, he was man of extraordinary writing talents, as was A.B.Guthrie, his Pulitzer prize winning novelist brother. Chick's was the human touch, the capacity for making loyal friends, the deep devotion to family.
"A great guy, Guthrie," I wrote on his retirement. "The word for him is genuine and genuineness is reflected in every word he ever wrote." On his death, that judgment still stands.
By Bradley Morison
Tribune retiree
From "To Believe That Spirit Triumphs"
A Memorial Meditation for Charles M. Guthrie
by Richard Mathison, pastor Lake Harriet Methodist Church
August 25, 1977
Here was a man who could write like Norman Rockwell could paint. He watched our great moments and our disastrous ones, our hilarious times and our clumsy ones, our presumptuous days and our humble ones-- and then let his typewriter tell the world about us! Most of all, of course, he also revealed himself. Among the most comforting revelations for me was the disclosure that he belonged, with me, to the select company of those who do not make their way in the world by trying to be handymen! When Chick sat at that typewriter, somehow all the glory of the commonplace sang through the keys.
Even the neighborhood children will miss him: four of them took pencil and paper in hand and scrawled their own note of sympathy this week. His host of friends join the family in missing a man who saw life straight but with a twinkle of humor; a warm, positive, complimentary guy; one concerned about the world around him but most of all about people. He lived his principles and earned the description, "genuine."
From:
Four Miles From Ear Mountain
by A.B. Guthrie, Jr.
BROTHER
You were bossed all your life,
dear, gentle brother,
bent to duck strife.
It was "Do so" and "Do not" and "Hey,"
and you did and you didn't,
meek to obey.
Seeing you, live and dead, I could cry,
gentle boy into mild man.
Not in you to ask why.
You joked with few days remaining.
When death became boss
You went uncomplaining.
published by The Kutenai Press
Missoula, Montana
Copyright 1987
