Sticks Nix Hick Pix - Fame

Fame

The headline is one of a handful that have entered the lore of journalism, as described in this essay by longtime Associated Press reporter Hugh Mulligan:

Down the years, some of journalism’s most famous headlines have brilliantly suggested what happened and have coaxed the reader to find out more:
  • WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG
  • FORD TO NEW YORK: DROP DEAD
  • HEADLESS TORSO IN TOPLESS BAR
  • HICKS NIX PIX IN STICKS

Mulligan got three of the four headlines wrong, including the "Stix" headline: The 1975 New York Daily News headline was actually "Ford to City: Drop Dead". The April 15, 1983 New York Post headline was: "Headless Body in Topless Bar".

He is one of many who have misquoted the "Stix" headline over the years. It is often misquoted with all four words ending in X. That misspelling appeared in the 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy, in which George M. Cohan (played by James Cagney) explains the headline's meaning to several young people, who use it as the basis of an impromptu swing song.

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Famous quotes containing the word fame:

    Expenditure now attracts fame as conquest once did.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    Fair nymph, if fame or honour were
    To be attained with ease,
    Then would I come and rest me there,
    Samuel Daniel (1562–1619)

    but as an Eagle
    His cloudless thunderbolted on thir heads.
    So vertue giv’n for lost,
    Deprest, and overthrown, as seem’d,
    Like that self-begott’n bird
    In the Arabian woods embost,
    That no second knows nor third,
    And lay e’re while a Holocaust,
    From out her ashie womb now teem’d
    Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
    When most unactive deem’d,
    And though her body die, her fame survives,
    A secular bird ages of lives.
    John Milton (1608–1674)