Trivia

Newspaper columnist, humorist and short-story writer.

In 1930 his widow won a $1-million (later reduced to $250,000) plagiarism lawsuit against Harold Lloyd, convincing the court that the concept of his film The Freshman (1925) originally came from her husband. In 1933 the Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Lloyd and reversed the earlier decision.

One night while covering a political convention for a New York newspaper, torrents of laughter erupted from his hotel room. When his fellow journalists burst into his room thinking they were missing out on something, they found Witwer alone, reading the column he had prepared for the next day's publication.