Bill Corum

Martene Windsor "Bill" Corum" (July 20, 1895 - December 16, 1958) was a sports columnist for the New York Evening Journal and the New York Journal-American, a radio and television sportscaster, and racetrack executive. He served as president of Churchill Downs for nine years, and is widely credited for coining the term "Run for the Roses" to describe the Kentucky Derby.

Bill Corum was born in Speed, Missouri in 1895. He attended high school in Boonville, Missouri and graduated from Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri in 1913. He then entered the University of Missouri, graduating in 1917.

He enlisted in the U.S. Army upon the United States entry into World War I and would later earn a commission. He served as company commander of Company D, 101st Infantry Battalion of the 96th Infantry Division and, at age 23, was the youngest major in the Army during the war.

Following the war, he entered the Columbia University School of Journalism, while working as a copy editor at The New York Times. He moved from the copy desk to assistant sports editor after graduating from Columbia.

In 1924, he was assigned to the baseball beat covering the Brooklyn Dodgers. In July 1925, he left the Times for the New York Evening Journal to cover the New York Giants. By 1926, Corum became the Journal's lead columnist. His first column appeared July 28, 1926. Over the next 32 years, he filed nearly 10,000 columns with the Evening Journal and, following the merger of Hearst's morning and afternoon papers, the New York Journal-American, becoming one of the nation's most recognizable sports columnists and radio personalities.

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