![]() Then, doctoring his birth certificate, he joined the Canadian armed forces at the age of 16.Īs a Tribune reporter, he became known as a debunker. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where he is remembered as a football player for the Columbus Academy. Sayre, whose peregrinations started from Marion, Ind., a farmland community on the Mississinewa River, where he was born the son of Joel Grover Sayre, who was in the plate‐glass business, and of Nora Clemens Sayre, a photographer and interior decorator. “The wandering behemoth, a great man,” was what Mr. It was made into the 1951 film “Fourteen Hours.” In the postwar years, perhaps his bestremembered piece of reportage was New Yorker article, “The Man on the Ledge,” about a man who spent half day on a windowsill of the Gotham Hotel before leaping to his death. Sayre was best known for his New Yorker coverage of a relatively unsung corner of the conflict - the United States Persian Gulf Command, which ferried supplies across Iran to the Soviet Union. Sayre was great friend of the film's director, George Stevens, and the two are jointly credited by some with improvising the famous scene where an elephant is fed whisky.Īs a World War H war correspondent, Mr. Sayre was a Hollywood screenwriter, but some film historians remember him especially for a nonverbal contribution to his favorite film, “Gunga Din,” which he worked on in collaboration with Fred Guiol. Stanley Walker, city editor of The Tribune, described him as “the puckish ribcrusher who can sing old songs for 12 hours without repeating.” Sayre loomed on the New York newspaper scene - he was a square‐jawed six‐footer of imposing girth - he found himself specializing in reporting about John Thomas (Legs) Diamond, the gangster, and in late‐night songfests with newspaperman friends. Sayre's life: his World War I service was not with the rest of his generation in the trenches of Europe, it was as a teen‐ager with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Siberia. There was an exuberant unpredictableness to the episodes of Mr. ![]() Sayre “was one of the finest of all the factual writers, I think - a marvelous reporter he had a strong individual style, his writing had humor, warmth, deep feeling for people, and great vitality.” William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, said yesterday that Mr. Sayre looks like a granite cottage wearing an oldRoman grin,” and praised his book of reportage about a German family, “The House Without a Roof,” saying he “makes you see the human beings sometimes lost in the epics of the big bow‐wow school” of writers. ![]() Sayre, a burly Hoosier with heavy bones and a light heart, bounced through many worlds in his offbeat‐career as adventurer, satirical novelist, Hollywood figure and writer for The New York Herald Tribune and The New Yorker and his bulk and his brains and his adventures filled literary critics with affectionate awe.Ĭalling his first novel “Rackety Rax,” “as hilarious and uproarious a piece of satire as American literature has yet produced,” Lewis Gannett, critic for The Herald Tribune, wrote in 1933, “Joel Sayre is the ex‐Oxford don, once Admiral Kolchak's bodyguard and a wild bull of the pampas of Manhattan.”Ĭharles Poore, critic of The New York Times, wrote in 1998, “Mr. Joel Sayre, the swashbuckling reporter and war correspondent who was the chief script writer for “Gunga Din,” died of heart failure Sunday in Taftsville, Vt., where he lived.
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