Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 17, 1995                   TAG: 9509150140
SECTION: BOOKS                    PAGE: F4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY SIDNEY BARRITT
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A `WORKING STIFF'S' DIARY OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Edward Robb Ellis began to keep a diary at age 16.

That was in 1927. He continues to this day.

Small wonder that this diary, now in its 68th year, appears in the Guinness Book of Records. Of course, mention of itself does not deserve more than passing attention. What commends Ellis' diary, published here in excerpted form, to our reading is his career as a journalist and historian.

He covered the election of 1928 for his hometown Kewanee (Ill.) Star-Courier. He moved to New Orleans where Huey Long and Louis Armstrong were subjects for his pen. The Great Depression was on and so he covered that in New Orleans and later in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl.

Following stints in Peoria and Chicago, he joined the Navy in World War II and was a journalist on Okinawa.

After the war, it was back to Chicago and then on to New York to write for the World Telegram, an excellent stage for an enterprising reporter and feature writer.

Some of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century appear in person because Ellis had the good fortune to interview them. The diary is not the news articles that resulted but rather his personal reaction to them, a glimpse of what sort of people they were apart from their public personae. So, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Douglas McArthur, Huey Long, Irving Berlin, Mae West, Helen Hayes, Barbra Streisand all appear. There are e.e. cummings, Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, Grace Kelly and more.

But that is not the half of it. Ellis' own life is part and parcel of it all. He falls in love, marries, is divorced and eventually remarries quite happily only to be set adrift when his wife dies. He flunks out of college but goes back to get a degree. He drinks too much, then joins Alcoholics Anonymous. He tries marijuana and describes his visions. He looks for meaning in books, amasses a huge personal library and then more likely finds meaning in the people he meets.

There are other diaries to be read, some for literary style and others for trenchant insight into a particular period of history. When Eddie Ellis wrote for the World Telegram, he might have described himself in New Yorkese as a "working stiff," a common man without pretensions to greatness.

Read this! There is greatness in what America has been in the 20th century and a good bit of it can be found in the lives of common men such as Eddie Ellis. His uncommon gift is to reflect and record every day of his life in a tumultuous century. It's a mirror of Everyman's life.

Sidney Barritt is a Roanoke physician.