William S. Gailmor papers, 1944-1972

William S. Gailmor was a nationally known radio news commentator, journalist and medical writer. Born William Margolis in Passaic, New Jersey, on April 28, 1910, he was a graduate of New York University and Yeshiva College and served as an orthodox rabbi in New York City and Ottawa, Canada during the 1930s.

Gailmor left the rabbinate in 1939 and started his journalism career as a radio news reporter for a small Yiddish language radio station in New York, moving on to the radio news desk of the “New York Daily News”.

He worked as a radio commentator and print journalist during the 1940s and 1950s, broadcasting for WJZ, WHN, and WLIB in New York and, later, WPEN in Philadelphia. In 1947 he received the prestigious Page One Award of the Newspaper Guild of New York.

In 1949 Gailmor scored a notable coup by becoming the first American journalist to interview Yugoslavia's premier Marshal Tito after his break from the Soviet Union. This reportage was published in the "New York Post".

He wrote a daily human welfare column for a progressive newspaper, "The Daily Compass", based in New York, until its demise on Election Eve, 1952. “The Compass,” as it was called, grew out of the presidential campaign of former FDR Vice President Henry A. Wallace in 1948, on the Progressive Party ticket. Gailmor was the campaign’s fundraiser, and was nicknamed “the people’s pickpocket” by friend and enemy alike. For "The Compass" he also wrote light verse under the name Duane Hudson, after the intersection of two streets where the newspaper’s offices sat.

A later public relations and executive position at the Valley Forge Heart Hospital near Norristown, Pennsylvania, led Gailmor to develop a career in medical writing during the 1950s and 1960s, becoming a nationally known lay expert on medicine and mental health. He edited several professional periodicals for Interscience International in New York, and he was a founder of the American College of Sports Medicine.

William S. Gailmor passed away on November 14, 1970, leaving a wife and two grown children.

Written by Wendy Gailmor Newton.