THE CITY ROOM knows him no more.

He has passed on to some private and personal Nirvana of his own, where every typewriter has all its keys and a bottle waits at every four-alarm fire.

And the only epitaph he would have wished is this..."He was a good reporter."

His greatest, and most unconscious, characteristic was an insatiable curiosity. He seethed with questions. Nothing was as it seemed, and he picked frantically at surface facts until the shell broke and the muck, or the treasure, underneath was exposed to his greedy mind.

With or without the vine leaves in his hair, his sense of news verged on the occult. He knew bishops and gunmen, politicians and pickpockets, and treated both the great and the sham with the same casual impertinence. His mind was a brimming pool of assorted facts, which he turned on and off like a tap.

Under a glass-hard exterior, he had a heart as soft as mush. He rooted fiercely for the underdog, perhaps because he was so much the underdog himself.

He got paid very little--and when other people talked of the "profession of journalism" his was the loudest laugh.

Sometimes he grew out of it. Sometimes he became a famous columnist, a noted author, or even an Editor. But mostly he grew old at 45. And when he saw a new youngster in the City Room he figured the best thing he could do was to take him accoss the street and say to him: "Kid, what the hell are you doing around here? Get out of it. It's a lousy business..."

But the youngster never took his advice. Year after year thousands of new youngsters decided there was only one thing in the world they wanted to be--a newspaperman. And the American press grew up.

The old-time reporter has passed from the scene. But he left behind him a legacy of incalculable value to the nation. For he established the tradition of good reporting as the foundation of a free press.

What happened? Who did it? Where? When? Why?

As long as these questions can be asked by good reporters free to write the truest and frankest answers they can find, freedom will have survived.

True, since the days of the old-time reporter, both men and minds have changed. The reporter of today is a better man than his predecessor. He has to be. He is better-educated, better-paid. Neither he nor his editor can get away with the cheap sensationalism of yesterday's Yellow Journalism--and neither of them insists on any special license to get drunk. The reporter's passport today is respected everywhere, and he is expected to live up to the code of his profession.

Too, America's appetite for news has grown sharper. It takes some 25,000 local reporters and 1,888 daily newspapers to gratify it. Altogether, 300,000 men and women are engaged in telling you what is happening in the world, with all the trimmings you're accustomed to-comic strips, women's pages, photographs, society notes, advice to the lovelorn, columnists, cartoons, editorials, crossword puzzles.

But whatever the extra values newspapers and magazines may offer today, one thing remains the same...the beart of a free press is still the good reporter. It is still the man with the nose for news, as peculiar and authentic a possession as the eye of a painter or the ear of a musician.