Editor’s note: Andrew Perzo is on vacation. Today’s Informer features a column that first ran on Oct. 18.

Maybe you read the 75 Years Ago column in the Friday, Oct. 9, newspaper titled “McNeese football debut.” I did and I found it very funny and clever. I wonder whether the American Press has the name of the writer. Can you find out for me?

Absolutely.

The article, which originally appeared in the Oct. 9, 1940, edition of the American Press, was written by Elliott Chaze, whose work has over the years made frequent appearances in the newspaper’s look-back columns.

Chaze, who started his journalism career with the American Press, went on to serve as a paratrooper in World War II; work as an editor and reporter for The Associated Press and the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American; write several articles and short stories for Life, The New Yorker, Reader’s Digest and other national publications; and pen nine novels, including the noir classic “Black Wings Has My Angel.”

Chaze was born in Mamou on Nov. 15, 1915. He graduated from Bolton High School in Alexandria and attended Tulane University, Washington and Lee University, and the University of Oklahoma.

His name — shorn of his given first name, Lewis — first appeared in the American Press on July 17, 1939, as the author of a column titled “But Really —.”

From that first column, about boxing:

“Two ancient and spiritless habitu?s of Slap-Happy street may waltz again on the uncertain surfaces of pugilistic plaza soon — under circumstances more pitiful than proper. Introducing them from left to right as they lie comfortably and customarily on the canvas, I give you Maxie Baer and der Max Schmeling.”

His full name appeared in the Nov. 14, 1940, editions of the newspaper in a list of local draft registrants. His number was 2472.

His last column appeared in the March 3, 1942, edition of the American Press. His name next appeared in the paper as the author of a Jan. 14, 1947, Associated Press story filed from New Iberia.

“Lanky Willie Francis is rubbing elbows with death today but he’s ‘right interested to find out if I can die like the man I thought I was,’ ” the story begins.

“Francis, who once cheated the electric chair when a mechanical malfunction allowed him to walk away from it alive, was singularly cool when he learned that the United States supreme court had ruled him subject to another trip to the chair.

“ ‘I always sort of wondered if I was a brave man,’ the tall, cocoa-colored Negro said in an interview here today.

“ ‘Now I guess I’m gonna find out. And I’m gonna find out the hard way, boss, so there won’t be no doubt in my mind when I leave. A lot of men never find out. A lot men die still wondering if they was the men they thought they was.’ ”

“Black Wings,” originally published by Gold Medal in 1953, has been reissued by New York Review Books. From the NYRB catalog entry for the book:

Gold Medal books weren’t books that won literary awards, or any kind of awards at all. But during the 1950s Gold Medal put out some of the best authors America had to offer, writers like Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, and David Goodis, who not only peered into the bleakest reaches of the psyche, but did it with blood-tinged glee. And while many of the Gold Medal pulps have since become acknowledged classics, one of its finest, Elliott Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel, has remained in the shadows, passed along from reader to reader despite being championed by the likes of Ed Gorman and Bill Pronzini. Yet from the very first pages it’s clear that Black Wings Has My Angel ranks with the best of the era.

Chaze died Nov. 11, 1990, in Hattiesburg at the age of 74.

Online: www.nyrb.com.