\"The Daily News\" Bob Sylvester Signed 3X5 Card For Sale

Up for sale "The Daily News" Bob Sylvester Hand Signed 3X5 Card. 

written “Dream Street,” died early yesterday of a heart ailment at his home.

Mr. Sylvester, who became 68 years old last Friday, lived at Old Montauk

Highway, Montauk. L.I. Robert McPhierson Sylvester's columns for The News were

a pastiche of the goings on of what remained of Broadway's cafe society, light‐hearted jabs at celebrities, one‐line witticisms allegedly overheard

in restaurants and saloons and sketches of the likable and not so likable

characters of New York City. Occasionally, Mr. Sylvester's columns were

personal and nostalgic accounts of famous persons and places. In 40 years of

newspaper work, he had been with the now defunct New York Evening World and The

New York American as well as with The New York Evening Post before joining The

News. As a reporter in the late nineteen — thirties and early forties, Mr.

Sylvester covered the nightclub circuit of 52d Street when its string of jazz

clubs earned the label Swing Street. Out of these experiences and others he

wrote eight novels and one nonfiction volume, which was described as a backward

look at the New York clubs. At its height In the mid‐fifties, “Dream Street” was

published five days a week and syndicated in more than 30 papers. In the last

years, the column had run four days a week and, according to a friend of Mr.

Sylvester's, the writer had devoted his spare time to fishing. “When he was in

the city he was a columnist,” she said. “But out at his home in Montauk,

overlooking the ocean, he was a fisherman.” Mr. Sylvester who was born in

Newark on Feb. 7, 1907, later moved with his family to West Haven, Conn. He

attended both Columbia and Yale universities and started his career as a

newspaperman at The New Haven Evening Register. He came to New York in 1930 and

worked as a publicity agent for the RKO Palace. He then worked as a rewrite man

on The Evening World, The American and The Post before joining The News in

1936. In 1946, Mr. Sylvester's first novel, “Dream Street,” was published and

it subsequently was made into a movie. This tale of a ruthless Broadway press

agent gave the title, but not the spirit, to Mr. Sylvester's column. The column

was not limited to Broadway celebrities, however, and from its start in 1951,

according to Douglas Watt, drama critic of The News, Mr. Sylvester was “very

scrupulous about avoiding Broadway gossip in his column.” Indeed, Mr. Sylvester

considered the Broadway column or gossip column popularized by Walter Winchell

a dying genre. “Broadway was once a great glamorous street. Now it's shoddy,”

he said in a 1967 interview. “You can't be the historian of something that no

longer exists.” of the nineteen‐fifties, the

quality of the house liquor at various bars and such observations as “It's a long road that has no Howard Johnson's.” Mr. Sylvester's

other novels that were made into movies were “Rough Sketch” (1947), “The Second

Oldest Profession” (1949), and “The Big Boodle” (1954). His other books were

“We Were Strangers,” “Indian Summer” (1951), “No Cover Charge” (1955), “Tropical

Paradise” (1958), “Memoirs of an Unidentified Man,” (1961) and “Notes of a

Guilty Bystander” (1970).