Louis Sobol, Last of Gossip Columnists Who Covered Broadway During the ‘20s

Louis Sobol, considered the last of the Broadway gossip columnists who wrote about that fabled avenue during the Roaring ‘20s years of gangsters and Prohibition, has died following a long illness. He was 90.

Sobol, whose colleagues included Damon Runyon, Earl Wilson, Walter Winchell, Dorothy Kilgallen and Ed Sullivan, died Sunday at Roosevelt Hospital.

Sobol wrote the New York Cavalcade, a chronicle of show business when Broadway was the center of that industry.

“I indulge in no profound crusading calisthenics,” Sobol once said of his column. “No world problems are attacked or solved here. We run along in our little corner offering no more excitement than a muffled popgun.”

“It was an exciting time with exciting characters,” said Sobol’s second wife, Peggy.

When Sobol retired in 1967, he had written his column for about 40 years, mostly for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and its successors, the Journal-American and the short-lived World Journal Tribune. His books included “The Longest Street,” a Broadway memoir in which he described table-hopping at 21, El Morocco, the Stork Club and the other watering holes of the era.