Pulitzer Prize Recipient in Journalism. Kirke Larue Simpson received professional recognition after being awarded the 1922 Pulitzer Prize in newspaper reporting with his series of articles on the burial of "The Unknown Soldier." After attending public schools, he served as a teenaged bugler, who often played "Taps," in the 1st California Volunteer Infantry in the Philippine Campaigns, during the Spanish American War and Philippine Insurrection in 1898. He began his journalism career first with the California newspaper, "Oakland Tribune" before going to a newspaper in Tonopol, Nevada, and by 1906, relocating for a post in San Francisco. In 1908 he started writing for the Associated Press in Washington, D.C., remaining with this publication until retiring in 1945. In 1912, he was the first to break the news of President Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign, which was a failed attempt to be re-elected to a third term and make three candidates for the office of President of the United States. Meaning to "hide actions from the public," he started the idiom "smoke-filled room" as a potent political phrase, after the 1920 smoke-filled Chicago hotel room, which was used to arrange Warren Harding's presidential nomination. More than the average reporter, he was well-versed on the why and where of current wars around the world. While at his typewriter, he scrutinized the day's war dispatches while studying the locations on his wall map. On November 9, 1921 he was among those who met the United States cruiser, "Olympia," bringing home the body of the Unknown Soldier from France. After attending the service at Arlington Cemetery, he began to type his report of the day's event. Remembering Robert Louis Stevenson's poem "Requiem," Simpson began his series of Pulitzer Prize worthy articles, "Under the wide and starry skies of his own homeland, America, the unknown dead from France sleeps, tonight a soldier home from the wars." In May of 1958, the "Santa Cruz Sentinel" ran an article "Pulitzer-Prize Winning Story of 1921 Earns Praise Today," which contained an interview with Simpson. He married twice: Ella May Field and then second, Irene L. Bassetti in October of 1953 and they are buried together. At age 90, his remains were cremated. Simpson's Pulitzer Prize was the first of many received by an Associated Press in Washington colleague. The Associated Press has garnered 56 Pulitzer Prizes, including 34 in the category of photography.