Ten Years In the Newspaper Game, part 5

[In this series, Beatrice Boedefeld Andrews described aspects of her experiences as a newspaper reporter and editor from 1910 through 1920. She worked first for The Elkhart Truth in Elkhart, Indiana, and later for the Casper Daily Tribune in Wyoming. She changed many names, such as substituting Concordia for her hometown, Elkhart. This is the final episode in the series. The first parts are:
I. Becoming a Sobsister.
II. Tramp Reporters.
III. City Editors I Have Known.
IV. Paste and Shears and Colyums.]


V. Getting the Big Thrills in the News Game

(Final story of a series by Beatrice B. Andrews, of Casper, Wyoming. Read this even if you have missed the others.)

No matter how much drudgery there is in the everyday round there are usually compensating moments. If there are not, then must the worker indeed be miscast in the great drama of earning a living and his plight is sad.

It is the knowledge that no two days will ever be alike that gives the newspaper game its great fascination. There is a treadmill, to be sure. Each day the beat must be traveled, and the reporter must ask his little list of pertinent questions, and meet with the same old answers:

“Well, what do you know today?”
“Not a thing.”
“Anything new, Bill?”
“Nothing new under the sun.”
“What’s doing in the shoe trade, John?”
“Oh, same old seven and six.”

But—you never know. Just around the corner the story of a lifetime may be lurking.

One of these days Bill may say, “Lots of excitement out our way last night, Joe. Man held up a guy, took a diamond and a watch off him and the guy managed to get him down and brained him with a brick.”

And you are off after a few questions on a red hot story.

To the girl reporter the thrills come a bit differently than to a man. For me there was my first scoop, a golden wedding celebration in which the leading figures were of unusual prominence. The tip had come from a preliminary story in the opposition paper, and they forgot to follow it up. I had many bigger and better ones later, but there is always a thrill in a first experience.

Among the highlights of my newspaper career, it seems to me now that election nights brought me the greatest thrills of all. There is a sort of breathless excitement in a newspaper office on election night which the most callous and blasé person must feel. So many hopes hang on the figures reported piecemeal from the various polling places. The little more means so much in hope and anticipation, and the little less is so often the difference between rejoicing and despair. And there are all the thousands of eager people in the street outside, in the public gatherings, or in their homes, depending on the paper for their knowledge of the results. There is something big in feeling that your paper has been the first to compile the complete returns and get them to all those waiting people.

Election day was always a day of big preparations in the office of The News. Cards with the names of the candidates in the principal parties were prepared and the boys were sent out early in the afternoon to all the precinct polling places in the city with instructions to get the promise of one or, better, two of the officials to telephone us the vote as soon as the ballots were counted.

It was my task to assist in preparing great charts, cross-ruled for the number of precincts and vertically ruled so that each candidate might have a column, and see that the names of precincts and candidates were properly inserted. The huge projecting lantern was set in place in the editorial room and the white sheet upon which the returns would be flashed was stretched on the building across the street. Stacks of isinglass slides appeared on the editor’s desk to be typed with the bulletins when the news began to come in.

Sometimes extra telephones were installed, and an effort was made to rope off a space surrounding the desks of reporters, editor, and telegraph man to keep the politicians from crowding over the desks and interrupting the busy workers.

If it were a general election, there was a thrill in the report from that first little town in Massachusetts which always completes its count about 4:30 in the afternoon. There are only some 68 votes to be counted. Those 68 votes are as a grain of sand in the whole result, of course, but there is a superstition about the showing there, just the same. There was no reason for sticking around between five and seven o’clock, but we generally did, going out one at a time to snatch a bite to eat at a hot dog stand, or some place close at hand.

Then the wire would begin to tick off the first meager returns from upstate counties in New York. The great electric lantern would be turned on and focused by the man engaged to operate it and cartoons and preliminary messages would be flashed on the screen.

Answering the battery of telephones was my task. There were always two and sometimes three whose bells must be distinguished. Something definite had to be told each inquirer—the prestige of the paper rested on my shoulders, I felt. Each of those inquirers must get as much information from us as he got from the opposition and more if possible. It was no easy task either with very meager returns from New York, Chicago, and a few Ohio cities to answer the woman who immediately assumed that her candidate was elected because he was in the lead, or the man who demanded the local vote on sheriff when only the heads of the ticket had been tabulated.

Then the local returns would dribble in bit by bit. Volunteer workers had gained entrance to our roped off space by hook or crook, and were as busy with pencils, phones and cards as were the reporters.

“Here’s Harrison township complete,” would come from one.

“Can’t get anybody at Osolo North. Do you ’spose they’ve gone to bed without reporting?”

“I’m getting Osolo North right here, Bill,” from a volunteer on another telephone.

And all the while lights glaring, telegraph instrument clicking madly; typewriters pounding out a running story for the extra edition to be run as soon as enough returns were in to justify it; the electric lantern roaring and snorting; tobacco smoke thicker and thicker; elated and disgruntled candidates decorating the tables and chairs not otherwise in use, and getting in everybody’s way; litter on the floor growing thicker and thicker; and above and through it all the incessant ringing, ringing of the telephones.

Then a lull—complete returns from the city all in. Almost complete returns from the south half of the county, collected by the paper in the town which was the county seat, the trend of the national election as well as the state clearly shown—the final bulletin to the fast thinning crowd outside and supper for us.

No banquet tasted so good as those chicken suppers with their accompaniment of strong and bitter coffee sent in from some neighboring restaurant on the order of the editor.

One year the steward of the Elk’s Club sent us a feed of roasted wild duck, which was something to be remembered forever.

I was generally sent home in a taxi shortly after midnight.

“You’re game, girl,” the city editor would tell me, “but you’ll have to answer twice as many phone calls tomorrow and you’d better get some sleep.”

I never wanted to go, even though I knew, after the first time, just what the next day would mean. But even I had enough in 1916 when for three days the issue in the national election hung in doubt. I found myself saying mechanically, “We do not know yet, the result in California is still uncertain,” even though the party at the other end of the phone line hadn’t mentioned the election and was merely trying to give a personal.

Giving out the results in the World’s Series ball games always afforded me another thrill. For the eight days or so each fall when those games were on, all other afternoon work of mine was secondary to phoning ball scores to anxious fans gathered in some eighteen or twenty pool rooms and like centers throughout the town.

With the aid of the telephone company, we worked out a plan of having these parties put on our line all at once while I repeated the score slowly three times. Those who got it then hung up and those who had questions were supposed to ask them one at a time. Of course they all piped up at once, but the scheme worked fairly well at that.

The installation of an electric score board and the employing of a megaphone man to detail the plays brought the fans from the pool rooms to the street in front of our building and cut my work down to answering only the casual inquiries from men and women fans all over town—merely three or four hundred, and they all wanted the result by innings—or so it seemed. But it was something out of the ordinary, and there was again the satisfaction of furnishing eagerly waiting people with news which they could not get in any other way.

Twice the paper on which I worked managed to “scoop the world” for the news service which furnished it its telegraph news.

Through the United Press, the News was the first to announce to the world that arrangements had definitely been concluded for the big railroad strike which was threatened in 1916. A high official in one of the brotherhoods [a union official] lived in Concordia, which was a railroad division terminal, and telegraphed the news to us immediately after the action was taken in Cleveland and before the meeting which was held behind “closed doors” had adjourned for the day.

We were able to make a definite announcement from Concordia before the news appeared in the Cleveland papers.

In December, 1919, the Tribune at Casper “scooped the world” on the capture of Carlisle, the daring train bandit who escaped from the Wyoming penitentiary at Rawlings and immediately afterward held up a Union Pacific train in the spectacular manner which he had made peculiarly his.

After robbing the train, the bandit, wounded, escaped into the desolate mountainous wilds which lie between the Union Pacific and central Wyoming and made his way from ranch to ranch until word of his whereabouts was finally sent to the sheriff of Converse County. The train robber, half delirious from a septic wound, was surrounded in a lonely cabin and brought to Douglas, later to be returned to the “pen.”

Their imaginations fired by his daring, jokesters all over the country kept sending out news of Carlisle’s appearances, and wires warning U. P. officials of further contemplated robberies were received at points all up and down that road so that there was universal interest in Carlisle’s capture.

Our regular edition had gone to press when the telephone rang and the editor was summoned to talk with Newton, editor of the paper at Cody. Newton happened to be in Glendo, east of Douglas, on business and had seen the sheriff’s party bring Carlisle in. He gave us a complete story of the capture and we were able to send a man by automobile to Douglas before the party with the bandit arrived there on the evening train.

Our extra contained the first published news of the capture and through the Associated Press, Casper told the world about it that night and the following morning. We even had the story before the editor of the Douglas weekly knew what the purpose of the sheriff’s mission had been.

I was not much surprised, however, when I met him the following spring. Douglas is one of those towns where they “roll up the sidewalks at nine o’clock each night.” Indeed, I first heard that phrase in Douglas when I was sent there for a week in April, 1920, to cover a murder trial as special correspondent for my own paper and for the Denver Times and the Denver Rocky Mountain News.

That was about the most important assignment I ever received, I think.

A dramatic story lay back of the murder of a deputy sheriff for which a young taxi driver was on trial. Politics was involved, a prosecuting attorney had resigned because the case had been taken out of his hands and put in the hands of special prosecutors. He and the sheriff had been arrested by the town marshal on a warrant issued by the prosecutor prior to his resignation. Casper had so taken sides that a change of venue to Douglas had been secured.

The shooting resulted from an effort by the sheriff’s office to run down bonded whiskey valued at $50,000 which had been stolen from a warehouse in Casper. It had been moved several times and an old taxi man by the name of Moore was believed to be directing the operations. A Moon car which he owned had been followed on mysterious errands. Finally the cache was located with the help of four Greek stool pigeons. The liquor had been stored under a garage built by a plumber living in the east end of Casper. The man was the father of nine children and probably needed the money given him for concealing the liquor.

When tipped off one night that the cache was about to be moved again, the sheriff, without stopping for a search warrant, took his entire force to the spot, intent on recovering the stolen liquor.

Armstrong, detailed by Moore to watch the place that night, was on the scene. His defense was that he and Martin, the plumber, had thought the house was being attacked by Greeks who hoped to get the liquor and that he and Martin were defending the latter’s home when they shot at the intruders.

The state contended that the sheriff and his men had commanded Armstrong and Martin to halt as they emerged from the house and told them the place was being searched by officers. That in spite of this Armstrong had fired, killing Majors, a deputy, and Martin also fired, wounding the old bailiff who had been taken along as an additional deputy. Martin himself was shot by a third deputy. Moore and Martin were held as accessories, their trials to follow if Armstrong were convicted.

It was the most dramatic trial which Douglas had seen for a number of years and the courtroom was crowded daily. The streets and the terrible eating houses were crowded with Casper people who were likewise there for the trial. The hotel was filled with them also.

My instructions were to treat the story in an absolutely impartial manner, favoring neither side, and in particular, I was not to give importance to the arguments of the attorneys.

The paper was in a delicate position, for at the time of the shooting we had been loud in our championship of the sheriff, only to find that his carelessness and negligence in not procuring a search warrant would probably lose the case, which it did.

So I was somewhat put to it to keep the goodwill of my attorney friends on either side who would discuss the case over luncheon or dinner tables, each blowing his own horn a little and hoping to see some kind words on his cleverness and wisdom appearing in the next issue of my paper.

I was kept on the keen jump when it came to getting my reports for the Denver papers written and filed at the given hour without missing anything of importance in the court procedure. The detailed story for my own paper was sent out on the night train, and I always had the escort of a couple of deputy sheriffs down the dark street which led to the station.

One night they treated me to ice cream at the Bull Pup Café and pointed out holes in the woodwork made in some general shooting affray which had occurred there when the place was a saloon.

“Yep, Red Jack died right over there by the door, and the bullet that killed him went right through, making that hole,” Roberts, one of the deputies, said. Real wild west stuff.

In the end, the state lost the case, partly on the fact that the sheriff had no search warrant and that Martin had been defending his home, presumably from Greek marauders; and partly because the counsel for the defense was far more clever in his final arguments than was the Irish special prosecutor who bellowed and roared, got red in the face, tore his collar loose so that one end rode wild under his ear, and tried to make up in noise what his arguments otherwise lacked in effectiveness.

Even the elements seemed to protest the verdict which set Armstrong, Moore and Martin free, for a terrific April blizzard struck Wyoming that night and marooned us all in Douglas for two days after the trial ended, all traffic by road or railroad being at a standstill for that length of time.

And so I covered a murder trial. There was plenty of chance for “sob stuff.” Armstrong’s aged parents were there from their Missouri home and sat by his side, day after day, making a most appealing picture for the jury. And on the other side of the courtroom Major’s widow with her two little fatherless children, a baby boy and a little girl, also sat, day after day, where the jury could see them plainly.

Armstrong had always been a model son at home, they told me. Church and Sunday School and all that. They couldn’t believe that he had intended to do anything wrong.

One of the deputies had ruthlessly shot a Mexican in Cheyenne in performance of his duty, so he said, but he was scared to death that the attorneys for the defense would bring up the affair in an effort to discredit him, and as a result made a very poor witness.

The poor old sheriff had a horror of death and had had an attack of mental aphasia at the coroner’s inquest brought on by his grief at the death of his deputy and the shock of the whole affair. But he got no sympathy on that score when he had to admit on the witness stand that his mind was blank on many of the happenings of the day after the murder.

The wife and two of Martin’s little daughters testified to being roused from sleep by shots and brutally harried by deputy sheriffs in their search of the Martin house for the gun used by Armstrong.

And all of this I used to its fullest extent, you may be sure.

It is well these high days do not come too frequently, and that there are stretches in between of the quieter search for everyday news. But they do come, to every reporter, and it is the hope of getting the big assignment which keeps him always alert to do his best on the little ones.

And the only reward he wants is to have the old man look up for an instant, after reading his story, and remark, “This is good stuff. Give us some more.”

A great newspaper man who once addressed the Medill School of Journalism in Chicago said he counted that moment the greatest in his life, and I count the rare times when it has happened to me as my most satisfactory moments, too.

***********************
Notes:

1. Bill Carlisle, the train robber, was an orphan who had moved to the Powder River country and was a hard-working cowhand until he robbed a train during a destitute period of his life. He was known as “The White-Masked Bandit” and the “Gentleman Bandit” for refraining from robbing servicemen, women, or children. He had served about 3 years of his life sentence when it was commuted to 25 – 50 years, but he decided he couldn’t wait that long and escaped by being carried out in a packing case of shirts—he had worked at the prison shirt-making factory. After his capture and return to prison, he received time off for good behavior and was released in 1936. His later life was successful and honest.
2. A Moon car was one manufactured by the Moon Motor Car Company out of St. Louis, Missouri.
3. Greek stool pigeons: men who agreed to tell authorities what they knew in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Greeks were stereotyped at the time as mobsters.
4. Aphasia is a type of brain injury that affects the ability to communicate, whether speaking, writing, or understanding, or some combination of the three..
5. The murder of Tom Majors was for many in Casper the last straw in a series of corruption scandals in which it seemed to the general public that bootleggers and other criminal syndicate types were running things and getting away with their crimes. Here is another version of the case, written by Alfred J. Mokler, a former publisher of the Natrona County Tribune who had retired in 1914, author of Natrona County History 1888—1922, published in 1923.
“Bootleggers Murder an Officer
“Charles Moore, H. J. Evans, H. B. Armstrong, Roy E. Martin and Lawson Hallowell, the three former being taxi-drivers and the two latter engaged in the plumbing business, but whose principal occupation was bootlegging, were the principals in an atrocious murder Sunday morning, November 2, 1919, when Deputy Sheriff Tom Majors was shot in the arm and the head with a shot gun and instantly killed and County Jailer George McKenzie was shot in the right shoulder. Martin was shot in the right breast three times and the thumb of his right hand was shot off by one of the deputy sheriffs. McKenzie and Martin were taken to the hospital and in due time both recovered from their wounds.
“Armstrong and Moore had previously been arrested upon the charge of stealing $40,000 worth of whiskey, but the case against them was dismissed on account of the lack of evidence. It was learned that about two hundred cases of liquor had been stored on the Martin property, and at 4 o'clock in the morning Sheriff Pat Royce, Deputy Sheriffs Tom Majors, W. E. Kilgore, Charles Easton and George McKenzie and Special Detective Roberts of the Burlington railway went to the Martin plumbing shop to make a raid on the bootleggers. When the officers surrounded the building, Armstrong and Martin came around a corner armed with shot guns. Majors saw them approaching and called to them to put up their hands. "Go to hell! Put up your own," was the answer and command of Armstrong, and without further parley he fired at the officer. The first shot shattered the deputy sheriff's right hand and the second shot struck him full in the mouth, the charge passing through and blew out the back of his head. Martin opened fire at about the same time and wounded McKenzie, but before he could fire a second time Roberts opened fire on him, with the result of four bullets taking effect, three in his chest and one shattering his thumb. Armstrong and Martin then ran to Martin's house which was near by. When the smoke of the tragedy had cleared away search was made of the premises and great quantities of liquor were found buried under the floor of the plumbers' shop, the cases being covered with several inches of earth.
“Armstrong and Moore were placed in jail and Martin was guarded by a deputy sheriff in the hospital. Evans and Hallowell were dismissed. The board of county commissioners appointed C. E. Winter and M. W. Purcell as special prosecutors for the county to prosecute the case against the assassins. This action of the county commissioners caused Prosecuting Attorney W. E. Patten to feel slighted, and he caused the arrest of Sheriff Royce and Deputy Kilgore at 2:30 in the morning of November 6, charging them with feloniously attacking Armstrong on the morning of November 2, with the purpose of committing violent injury upon him. The sheriff and his deputy were dispossessed of the office and Constable John McClellan, who served the warrants on the officers, took charge. The trial of the sheriff and his deputy were had before Judge W. E. Tubbs without delay and the cases against them were dismissed, and the sentiment of the community was so strong against the prosecuting attorney that he was forced to resign, and the feeling against the men who were charged with the murder of the deputy sheriff was such that a number of citizens organized and no doubt would have dealt out justice without waiting for trial by the courts had they not been assured by the special prosecuting attorneys, the county commissioners and other county officers that a speedy trial would be had and that justice would be meted out without unnecessary delay.
“At a preliminary trial held before Justice Tubbs on November 16 the three men were held to the district court for trial without bond upon the charge of murder in the first degree. At the December term of the district court in Natrona county a change of venue was demanded and granted and the case was ordered to be tried in Douglas before a Converse county jury at the April term of the district court. The case against Armstrong was the first to come to trial. There was no question in the minds of the people of Casper but a conviction would be had, and if ever a man deserved hanging it was the defendant, but be it said to the everlasting shame of the jurymen, some of the witnesses who gave perjured testimony, and others connected with the trial, a verdict of not guilty was returned by the jury, and once more the people of Natrona were compelled to witness a travesty of justice and the rights of good citizenship flung to the four winds. The charges against Moore and Martin were immediately dismissed after the verdict of not guilty was returned in the Armstrong case, and thus ended the farce with the courts, and the murder of Tom Majors has never been avenged.”

Ten Years In the Newspaper Game, part 3

[Beatrice Boedefeld was the society editor and a general reporter for the Elkhart Truth in Indiana from 1910—1919, after which she was a reporter for the Casper Tribune in Wyoming. She published this series in late 1924 through spring 1925 in a news trade magazine called The Nation’s Publisher. She changed many names, but some are easily identified—for example, Concordia is Elkhart—and those known are explained in the notes at the end of this post. If you missed the first two parts, they are: I. Becoming a Sobsister and II. Tramp Reporters.]

III. City Editors I Have Known.

(Third in a series of stories by Beatrice B. Andrews of Casper, Wyoming. You will enjoy this whether you have read the first two or not.)

It has been said that your genuine city editor is known by two infallible earmarks. He always blows up half an hour before press time and he always expresses his feelings by a savage use of the word “Hell.”

Some of the city editors I have known ran true to type and some did not. There are worse and better newspaper editors than the half dozen under whom I have worked but I would give up only one of the lot, and he was no true newspaper man.

My first two years in the newspaper game were spent under Ben Parker, ruthless, devoid of conscience, and absolutely ignorant of ethics. As business manager, he directed the policy of The News, even after he ceased to be city editor, and I wonder how I managed to keep any ideals after such an initiation into the news game.

“Get your story, no matter what the means,” was his idea. “Print what you know, whether they like it or not,” was another Parkerism, and the individual who incurred his enmity could hope for no quarter if the News ever dug up a story to his discredit. If hard pressed, he was not above printing newspaper hoaxes of purely mythical character. I remember one concerning an automatic telephone company which was to invade the field at Concordia, printed when Parker had just had a fight with the local phone company. There was no truth to the story but Parker ran it for several days, and the opposition was unable to deny it or run it down.

His political enemies had particular cause to fear his vitriolic pen. Campaign years were one long welter of mudslinging and backbiting. Parker loved nothing better than an editorial argument with the opposition sheet, but for all his cleverness he was never quite able to best George Stein of the Press. They presented much the spectacle of a huge ugly bull dog being tormented in a fight by a dancing, yapping fox terrier. Parker’s lunges were heavy, determined, and generally effective, if they hit, but by the time he had reached one mark Stein had shifted ground and was ki-yi-ing at him from another angle.

The local option fight in Indiana furnished them with endless material. The Press was pro-option and the News anti. The campaign of Senator Roberts, the boy-orator of Concordia for the Governorship on an anti-option platform brought on a fight of months which ended when the Press proved that Mr. Roberts was not old enough to be Governor.

Having backed Mr. Roberts in the lie about his age, the News stuck it out even after baby pictures and baptismal records had been produced.

Whenever a fight was on Parker was frightfully particular about the accuracy of everything we published although it did not matter so much at other times, and every story which was at all doubtful fairly bristled with the word “alleged” inserted as he edited the copy.

It was in the midst of one interminable argument between the two papers in which the underhanded methods and inaccuracy of the News was being flaunted daily in the Press that poor little Dick Davis, our hard working little cub, put over a “wooden scoop” that nearly disrupted the force.

Dick’s great ambition was to get a “big scoop.” He was always coming in with false alarms which more experiences reporters had to run down. Most of his stuff had to be re-written, and most of us were ready to vote him a real pest, although his willingness to run down tips was valuable to us all, at times.

Most of Dick’s stories were taken with salt, then, but this one seemed like the real thing.

“Yep, I talked to her myself,” Dick said when House questioned him about the story. “She was telling her friends at the dance Saturday night how she was locked in the filing vault at the plant where she works, see, Saturday noon, and might have had to stay there over Sunday, only her chum missed her, see, and went back to look, and they had to get the combination from the boss. She told me all about how she felt in there, and how she fainted when they got her out.”

So House added the thrills to the story in proper fashion and it was run under the heading “Trapped in Dungeon of Death.” It was a scoop, too.

But the next night—

“Movies Inspire Girl’s Yarn,” said the Press.

The heroine of our dungeon story confessed to having imagined herself in the role of some screen favorite she had just seen and to having deliberately “strung” poor Dick. The file vault in the factory proved to be a small affair with a window and an ordinary door, not a vault at all, in fact, much less a “dungeon of death.”

Parker wrote a retraction of the story, blaming the girl and exonerating Dick whose intentions were good. And he carried this policy into the office, blaming House and not Dick for allowing the story to get by.

About this time Parker was promoted to the post of business manager and J. D. Mathis became our city editor.

J. D., as he was known to us, will always be my idea of everything a newspaper man should not be. He was a liar, a hypocrite, and a coward. He went out of his way to lie when the truth would have been easier, it seemed to us, and he justified many of his untruths by a perverted philosophy which he said was the creed of some religious cult which he had embraced. Evidently, his crooked brain had misconstrued the teachings, however, for nothing with the name of religion could justify the lies which he told.

Wild promises of unlimited publicity were made by J. D. to people with projects to put over, and never fulfilled. Poems and manuscripts were accepted for publication and lost.

We all felt in mortal terror for our jobs, never knowing what sort of lie J. D. might tell Parker about us in an effort to excuse some of his own failures. If the paper was late it was always the fault of some reporter or of the leased wire operator. The operator got back by dating and timing his reports and keeping duplicates, but we had no such recourse.

My most disagreeable experiences in the news game were while J. D. was editor. Once he accused me, behind my back, of having appropriated theatre comps, promised to the bookkeeper, and really given by J. D. to a personal friend whom he happened to meet on the street.

When I learned of the accusation from Bert, the bookkeeper, I was fortunate in being able to produce the stubs of my balcony seats for which I had paid good money, and to tell him who had occupied the seats always reserved for the News.

“Good thing the desks in this office aren’t worth taking.” Bert remarked. “Maybe I’d better keep an eye on that fellow.” And the matter went no further.

Another time Dick informed me that Mathis had promised my job to a stenographer who had substituted for me during my vacation and I put in a few anxious moments although I knew that the conventions and other important doings in my field which were due at that time were entirely beyond the ability of my substitute. J. D. knew it too, as it happened. He had merely wanted to flatter the girl.

So, knowing his true character, we were none of us surprised when J. D. was found to have opened business office mail left by mistake in the editorial rooms, and to have appropriated to his own use several checks made out to “Editor, News.”

For several months, John King, formerly with the Press, had been our star reporter, and we all rejoiced when Parker made him city editor. King was a human dynamo, a small man, but the volume of work he could turn out was enormous. He had been brought up in Concordia but served his newspaper apprenticeship elsewhere. He had worked under Stein and knew all his methods and with his own ability added was without doubt the best reporter either paper had on its staff in a decade.

There was no loafing in the News office once King took charge. He set us a terrible pace, nerves were often strained to the breaking point, but we got out a great paper and we were proud of it. We were disgraced when we did not scoop the Press once or twice a day at least.

King had no patience with inefficiency or time killing.

“If you’ve got anything to write, write it. If not get out on the street,” he told us a dozen times a day.

“He oils the news machine with vinegar and sand and expects good work,” Brooks complained, but the fault lay in Brooks’ inefficiency. King soon transferred him to the mechanical department and Walker, who was always vacillating back and forth between the two papers, took his place.

While King was city editor we tried a six months experiment with a Sunday paper which came near killing all of us, although King was the chief victim.

Writing a feature article or two a week in addition to the daily stuff was interesting as soon as we learned how. Those features lurked in the most unexpected places. I interviewed the conductor of my street car one day and got a most interesting story on life from his point of view.

One night I stayed in the box office of the local theatre and made a story from the comments of the people who approached the window.

“Ish-ga-bibble,” that strange word which floated through our American slang for a season and then vanished, provided another interesting story—where did it come from and why?

But the rub came when we had to add a Saturday night session of work after getting out the regular Saturday edition. King always put in a straight 24 hours from 7 o’clock Saturday morning until the same hour on Sunday, for no extra Sunday editor was employed. I generally worked until midnight and the boys were on call until 2:30 a.m.

Often King would be found in the press room, helping insert the magazine and comic sections in the news section for the carrier boys, so tired he couldn’t have told his name. But as long as he could give such service Parker was willing to accept it.

One hot June night King collapsed and the Sunday News was not issued that night or again thereafter.

The News gang reached a high point of efficiency under King. Gone were the tramp reporters. Walker, who knew the town inside out, covered the city beat and the sports; Old Mac , who had been reporting when the rest of us were in our cradles, had deserted the Press and covered morts [deaths] and the courts for us. Frank Morris began as cub and worked up to star reporter during those years, finally taking the journalism course at Columbia and working for us in the summers. The high school paper was generally able to furnish us with a promising cub.

The News scintillated with unusual feature stories. We developed originality of style. Each of us had a coterie of fans who would give news stories to us first of all. We were delighted when they called on the telephone and insisted on speaking to Mac or Jim Walker, or Morris as the case might be.

Shortly before America entered the war, our owner, the grim old man whom we never saw, sold the News to a syndicate of Concordia business men, and overnight we changed all our policies. From a Democratic paper we became independent with strong Republican leanings, and there were other changes in policy just as drastic.

Parker resigned and King was promoted to be managing editor by the new owners.

We were not surprised when Frank Morris, who had completed his Columbia course, appeared as the new city editor, but it seemed strange to be working under him after coaching his beginning efforts.

Morris started a column in the News as an outlet for the wit which we had hitherto wasted in “pomes” pasted on the office wall. Before long we had regular contribs who found as much joy in getting into “The Office Window,” as we called it, as the Chicagoan does in “making the Line.”

The new owners provided us with a brand new building, but while we thrilled at the prospect of clean linoleum-covered floors, steam heat, screened windows and brand new shiny-topped desks, we all felt real regret at parting with our battered, paper-littered, dirty den in the old building. Then Morris enlisted.

With dismay we heard that the Press was going out of business and that Stein had been hired as our new city editor. It was worse for Walker and Mac, who had left the Press to get away from him, than for me. I can see old Mac’s face when they broke the news to us, yet.

For Stein had fixed notions on the conduct of a newspaper which nothing could change. He left nothing to the reporter. There was no place for originality or individuality in his scheme. Even society news must be written after one stereotyped pattern.

I was on a news beat and Ellen Bell held the society desk. Poor girl, how I pitied her. She knew how her people wanted their items written, but had absolutely no chance.

We were the most bullied, nagged and pestered lot of reporters you can imagine, and after the freedom we had enjoyed under King and Morris, the most miserable.

All our little pet individualities of style were cut out, old hackneyed leading paragraphs were substituted for our original ways of putting old things. There was no incentive to hunt for news off the beaten track and it was nag, nag, nag all day over trifles which had never seemed to matter to any of our previous editors.

Yet there were good points in Stein’s method. We overlooked nothing in the daily routine under his system. We were glad he had brought with him the “Black Maria”, which was responsible for many a beat [scoop] which the Press had secured over the News. This was a city directory of Concordia in the year 1900, and as Stein had checked his paper through the years he had noted interesting facts after the names of old residents, so that a reference to Maria revealed the dates of marriages, deaths, removals and other important facts at an instant.

If the name of a former resident appeared in the telegraphic news, Maria showed just where in the files the prized local end to the story could be found.

Stein’s system of keeping clippings on all future events so that all data at hand could be handed the reporter with the assignment was a great time saver. We had been accustomed to looking up our own material in the files.

On the whole, Stein came nearer the accepted idea of the city editor than any of the others I had known. Certainly his explosions as press time approached were classics. His vocabulary in times of stress was profane and picturesque. He made himself hated and feared in all quarters—until the press began to roll—and then we forgave him for half of it for the genial fun which followed the ranting and the raving. But the Stein rubber stamp which blotted out our individualities, that we never forgave.

During the flu epidemic of 1918 I had my one and only experience as city editor of the News.

Stein was called to a distant part of the state by the death of his father-in-law and was obliged to be away over a week attending to business details.

On the day after his departure, King, who had intended taking the desk in his absence, succumbed to the flu and had to be taken home after exposing the entire force. Walters was also down, which left old Mac, Jack Lester, Ellen Bell and myself.

“I guess it’s up to you, Miss B—,” the business manager told me the next morning, and I found it very much up to me.

Jack had practiced head writing to some extent and undertook to edit the telegraph report, while I attended to the local news. Both of us had news beats which we felt must be covered, and the day was one series of mad dashes to get stories and madder efforts to write, copy read, and head-line them. Ellen got everything possible over the phone. Old Mac even added a burst of speed to the pace at which he generally ambled over his beat. Our lunches were brought to our desks that we might save a little of the precious time. We were only half an hour late in going to press, and rather congratulated ourselves on our first effort.

The next day was Friday. The time was shortly before Thanksgiving, and the Friday paper always carried heavy advertising for Saturday sales.

Upon my arrival at the office at 7:30 Friday morning, half an hour ahead of my regular time, I found that the plague had indeed struck the News office. The proofreader, the copy boy, two girls from the business office, four out of five linotype operators, two ad men and one pressman had all succumbed and a sixteen page paper was due.

At 8 o’clock not a line of news copy had been set, the one machine operator left being the man who set the running matter for the ads. Ours was a union shop and the only linotype men available in town were non-union men employed by a patent medicine house which printed its own advertising matter.

Would our men work with them if the business manager could get them to come?

Heaven be praised, they would. The foreman of the composing room took the attitude that the flu was an “act of God,” and superseded all union rules.

As I remember it, that day was the longest, slowest, I ever experienced. It took those linotype men, unused to the hurry of newspaper composition, endless hours to set the copy which our regular men devoured with such rapidity, and other hours to make corrections. Some of the galley proofs looked utterly hopeless when corrections had been marked. Press time came and half the forms were still on the stones. It was fully six o’clock before the last page came from the stereotyper and was on the press. And to cap the climax, a dozen carrier boys, having routes in the outlying districts, refused to carry their routes at that late hour through the cold, wet snow which was falling, declared a strike, and either tore up their papers or dumped them in the alley. So after all our work only about a third of the edition was distributed to the readers that night.

How we got out a Saturday paper, I do not know. I can only remember sitting at my telephone, Jack and Ellen doing likewise, and saying over and over—

“Yes, we issued a paper last night but it was very late and some of the boys refused to take them out. The circulation man will see that all routes are carried today. Yes. We are very sorry that you didn’t get your paper. I am sure you will get one tonight,” ad infinitum and very much ad nauseum.

By working all day Sunday we got a little ahead of the game. Two of the machine men discovered that they did not have the flu, after all, and somehow we limped along until Stein returned. He gave Jack and me full praise for our work, for once, and with all his faults we could have embraced him. We had no desire to wear his shoes one minute longer.

Perhaps that year on the News was a purgatory to make me appreciate the almost newspaper heaven which I entered when I went to Wyoming to work on the Tribune at Casper.

No cramping of individual style there. It was Casper at the end of the boom, but teeming and bustling with life, ambition, prosperity, and a great pride and belief in her future. Everybody had news to give out. Everybody was eager to help the papers tell everything about Casper to the world. More news everyday than the paper could print.

Ray Edmunds, the city editor, had no time to work out assignments. We reporters worked them out for ourselves. He merely expected us to do our best and we did. I found myself covering stories which only men in Concordia ever handled. I stayed up until midnight covering council meetings and enjoyed the novelty of hob-nobbing with sheriffs, fire chiefs, policemen, justices and railroad officials.

Seemingly, Edmunds never got excited. He took things as they came, and they came thick and fast some days, with a calm and even manner which could not be ruffled. And what a paper he could turn out!

Ten years and six city editors, and of them all, only one who was in all ways disappointing. They didn’t all blow up at press time. They didn’t all say “Hell:” Some of them didn’t even smoke. But with the one exception they were real city editors, every one. I learned all I know from them, and they, themselves, were all worth knowing.

[Coming Next: IV. Paste and Shears and Colyums.]

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Notes:

1. Ben Parker’s real identity was Fred Palmer, born in Iowa in January 1877. He was married to a woman named Winnifred and had two daughters and three sons. He got into the news business early in life.
2. Stein’s real identity was Frank George Stahr, born in Indiana in March 1869. He was married to a woman named Jessie and had four children. He was a lifelong newspaper man, retiring from the Truth in 1945.
3. JD Mathis’s real identity was probably Irwin David Landis, who was the city editor in 1912 and did not stay in the newspaper business very long.
4. Bert Myers, the bookkeeper, did not have a pseudonym in this series.
5. John King was Tom H. Keene. He was the city editor from 1913 – 1916. In September 1914 he married Mrs. Bessie Simmons Coulson of Wenatchee, Washington; the couple had two children. Tom worked in newspapers all his life.
6. Jim Walker was James Blaine Walley, born in 1887 in Indiana. He was a cub reporter and then worked his way up to being a star reporter, but he did not stay in the newspaper business after the 1920s. He married Nola Schultz in 1917; the couple had no children.
7. “Old Mac” was probably J. G. McCloskey, born in the 1860s, who was maybe also a tramp reporter after all, but apparently very talented. He went to New England after working for the Truth. His wife, who divorced him eventually, lived in New York City. He was called Jack, and was always a newsman, also probably an alcoholic.
8. Frank Morris was Maurice Mahurin Frink, who went by the name “Mahurin.” He was born in Elkhart in 1895 and had been a cub reporter for the Truth before he went to Columbia University in New York City in 1914 or 1915, completing the School of Journalism course and graduating in the spring of 1916. He continued with his journalism career after serving in the military in World War I.
9. Maybe Jack Lester was really Mac Gildea, although Mac went to Columbia in 1916 and enlisted in the Ambulance Corps in 1917, so the dates do not match. However, she seems to have made composites of several reporters she had known, so this might be one of those.
10. The reason union men and non-union men could not work together was that the unions had strict rules forbidding the practice. Otherwise, company bosses could have hired a mix and lowered the pay rate.
11. Bee started work on the Casper Tribune in September 1919.