‘He wrote me a letter and said he had eight months to live.’

Teete Carle of North Hollywood was a publicity man for Paramount, MGM and Fox and worked with Clara Bow, W.C. Fields and Barbara Stanwyck. But some of his most vivid memories are of his childhood and his best friend in a small prairie town in Kansas .

I remember seeing Halley’s Comet originally in 1910. I was 10 years old in 1910. My father, who was a sign painter, had passes to the opening of an outdoor theater. At the end of the play, about 10 o’clock, we walked out onto Merchant Street and looked up, and there was this big comet. Strangely enough, it was right over the Emporia Gazette building. I should have accepted that as an omen. I was only 10 years old, but in four years I started as a cub reporter there.

Young Bill White was my closest friend. His father, William Allen White, published the Gazette. We grew up together, Bill and I. My name was Cecil, but my two kid brothers couldn’t say Cecil. I’d be out playing with Bill and they’d come to the front door and yell, “Teetle, Mama want you, Teetle.” I thought, “Gee, that’s a lot better than Cecil.” Then they just dropped it off at Teete. I worked for 40 years as a motion picture press agent, and I was always Teete Carle.

When Bill and I were 14 as cub reporters, we divided Commercial Street in half. I had everything south of 6th Avenue, and Bill had everything north. He had the high school, and I had the hospital. Mr. White had a theory that he would rather have a two-line personal in his paper than a banner line, because he wanted people to see their name in the paper. An item was, “Mr. and Mrs. O. P. Hagen of Lebo, Kan., were business visitors in Emporia today.” That was an item. At the end of the week, Bill and I would paste them up. We got 50 cents for a column. We made about $2.50 a week.

After three years at College of Emporia, Mr. White offered me a full-time job. I worked there 18 months and then came out here and finished college at USC. I started at Paramount in the publicity department in 1927. Bill moved to New York, wrote books and worked for Reader’s Digest.

I retired in 1968. One of the reasons I retired was to do something about my drinking. But I did one more job after I retired. A young independent agent asked me to go to Tucson on a picture to bail them out. I didn’t know until I got on the airplane that the source of the trouble was that their publicity man was a drinker. And here I was having trouble with my drinking. But I never let anyone there see me drinking, and it worked out fine.

A friend of mine who was a mystery writer living in Tucson stopped by one Sunday. We used to go on drinking parties when we were both writing mysteries. He said: “There has been a big change in my life. I don’t drink anymore.”

One day he had been drinking, and he ducked into a movie theater to avoid meeting somebody. What was playing turned out to be “Days of Wine and Roses.” He said: “When that picture finished, I was shaking all over. I resolved that I wouldn’t take another drink. I got help from some people, and I have not had a drink since then. And that’s been seven years ago.”

I remembered his story when I came back from Tucson, so I started to do something about my own program to get sober. That was 16 years ago, and I haven’t had a drink since.

Bill didn’t move back to Emporia until he found out that he had cancer. He wrote me a letter and said he had eight months to live. I wrote him every week, a bright, lightening letter about things we used to do when we were kids. I got one reply, then he just wasn’t up to writing. I’ve got a whole stack of letters from Kathrine, his wife, saying: “Bill loves your letters. Keep writing if you can. Don’t give up.”

Bill died from cancer of the lungs. We both drank, and we both smoked. I stopped smoking, but Bill never did. He just couldn’t quit. He died in 1973. He was 73 years old.