Editing Ed Sullivan (section)

==Early life and career==
Sullivan was born on September 28, 1901, in [[Harlem]], New York City, to Elizabeth F. (née Smith) and Peter Arthur Sullivan, a customs house employee. His twin brother Daniel was sickly and lived only a few months.<ref>{{Cite web |title=About Ed Sullivan |url=https://www.edsullivan.com/about-ed-sullivan/ |access-date=July 1, 2022 |website=Ed Sullivan Show |language=en-US}}</ref> Sullivan was raised in [[Port Chester, New York]], where the family lived in a small red brick home at 53 Washington Street.<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NCQaAAAAYAAJ&q=Edward+Vincent+Sullivan+Peter+Arthur+Sullivan |title= Current Biography Yearbook |publisher=H. W. Wilson Company |date=1953|author1=Block, Maxine |author2=Rothe, Anna Herthe |author3=Candee, Marjorie Dent}}</ref> He was of Irish descent.{{sfn|Harris |1968 |p={{page needed|date=December 2021}}}} The family loved music, frequently playing the piano, singing and playing phonograph records. Sullivan was a gifted athlete in high school, earning 12 [[Varsity Letter|athletic letters]] at [[Port Chester High School]]. He played football as a [[Halfback (American football)|halfback]], basketball as a [[Basketball positions|guard]] and track as a sprinter. With the baseball team, Sullivan was a [[catcher]] and the team's captain, leading the team to several championships. Sullivan noted that, in the state of New York, integration was taken for granted in high-school sports: "When we went up into Connecticut, we ran into clubs that had Negro players. In those days this was accepted as commonplace; and so, my instinctive antagonism years later to any theory that a Negro wasn't a worthy opponent or was an inferior person. It was just as simple as that."{{sfn|Nachman|2009|loc=Kindle location {{page needed|date=December 2021}}}}

Sullivan landed his first job at ''The Port Chester Daily Item'', a local newspaper for which he had written sports news while in high school and which he joined full-time after graduation. In 1919, he joined ''The Hartford Post'', but the newspaper folded in his first week there. He next worked for ''The [[New York Evening Mail]]'' as a sports reporter. After the newspaper closed in 1923, he bounced through a series of news jobs with [[the Associated Press]], the ''[[Philadelphia Bulletin]]'', ''The Morning World'', ''[[The Morning Telegraph]]'', ''The New York Bulletin'' and ''The Leader''. In 1927, Sullivan joined The ''[[New York Evening Graphic]]'', first as a sports writer and then as a sports editor.

In 1929, when [[Walter Winchell]] moved to ''The Daily Mirror'', Sullivan was named the ''New York Evening Graphic''<nowiki/>'s Broadway columnist. He left the paper for the city's largest tabloid, the ''[[New York Daily News]]''. His column, "Little Old New York", concentrated on [[Broadway theater|Broadway]] shows and gossip, and Sullivan also delivered showbusiness news broadcasts on radio. In 1933, Sullivan wrote and starred in the film ''[[Mr. Broadway (1933 film)|Mr. Broadway]]'', in which he guided the audience around New York nightspots to meet entertainers and celebrities. Sullivan soon became a powerful force in the entertainment world and one of Winchell's main rivals, setting the [[El Morocco]] nightclub in New York as his unofficial headquarters against Winchell's seat of power at the nearby [[Stork Club]]. Sullivan continued writing for the ''New York Daily News'' throughout his broadcasting career, and his popularity long outlived that of Winchell. In the late 1960s, Sullivan praised Winchell's legacy in a magazine interview, leading to a major reconciliation between the longtime adversaries.

Throughout his career as a columnist, Sullivan had dabbled in entertainment, producing vaudeville shows with which he appeared as master of ceremonies in the 1920s and 1930s, directing a radio program over the original [[WABC (AM)|WABC]] and organizing benefit reviews for various causes.