then heavyweight champion of the world, and someone passing
said to her companion, "Why, there's Will Cuppy."

But Cuppy was often equally set up by a lack of recognition.
I know he would have been delighted by the error on the part of
the newspaper to which he had contributed for twenty years, in
its early morning editions following his death. The picture labeled
"Will Cuppy" accompanying the obituary was of someone else.

On Cuppy's death I inherited the job of assembling his ma-
terial for publication. Except for the war years, I had been in
almost daily communication with Cuppy by phone ever since
he started on this book in the summer of 1933. These talks always
concerned whatever he was working on at the moment.

Sometimes, before the call was completed, there might be a
brief reference to some happening in the day's news. But Cuppy
really wasn't interested in the front pages of the daily papers.
Anything that happened after the eighteenth century left him
cold. In fact, the farther back in history he went, the more his
enthusiasm grew.

I can't help wishing that this book had been available in history
class when I first learned about these famous personages -- in a
somewhat different, and far less illuminating, perspective. The
historians whose works I was forced to read seemed to lose sight
of the fact that their subjects were human beings. Cuppy never
lost sight of it for a minute.

In closing, I'd like to express my thanks to my wife, Phyllis,
who spent many evenings and week ends going through dozens
of Cuppy's two hundred file boxes and deciphering his scrawls,
and to Alan Rosenblum, Cuppy's lawyer, who helped make pub-
lication possible at this early date.

FRED FELDKAMP

New York, N.Y.

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