Sept. 13, 1937: The story ran in six installments. After the series ran in the PG and the Toledo Blade, the series was syndicated by the New York Times and picked up by newspapers across the country — “newspapers whose own reporters had tried and failed to find what Sprigle found.”
In 1986 Bill Block, then publisher of the Post-Gazette, shared his memories of Sprigle: “Sprigle was a great reporter, but I think he would be very unhappy in this business today. He never could get the other side of a story because it ruined the kind of investigative pieces he liked to do.”
“But the story on Hugo Black was accurate, above all. He got the dope, there’s no doubt about it.”
