News Writing Part 36

35. These exercises are said to be less striving and to have more pleasure for all contestants.

36. The attaches of the United States Weather bureau here say that while the precipitation has been unusually heavy, the present storm and that predicted to follow it are but the usual rainy season rainfalls, for which there is no freak or extraordinary explanation.

_CHAPTER XIV_

_A._ Number 1 below is a copy of a speech delivered by George Ade last night at a dinner in honor of Mr. Brand Whitlock, United States minister to Belgium. Number 2 is a New York dispatch about the dinner. Write up the story for an Indianapolis morning paper on which you are working.

George Ade's home is in Indiana.

1. If you will go over the list of young men who wrote for Chicago newspapers twenty-five years ago you will be convinced that the newspaper business is the greatest business in the world for getting out of.

Let us go away back to 1890. Also let us go back to Chicago. I hope I am not asking too much. About twenty-five years ago in the Middle West there was a restless movement toward the newspaper office. Nearly every young man who could no longer board at home decided to enter journalism. Chicago called him.

Chicago is the home of opportunity--and other things.

The young man who wishes to be a book agent must have a prospectus. Any solicitor must own a set of application blanks.

The burglar needs a jimmy. But the journalist requires only a collection of adjectives. So I repeat that about 1890 all the by-roads led to Chicago and all the young men who abhorred farm work were arranging to be editors.

The period to which I refer was to Chicago what the Elizabethan period was to English letters. Joseph Medill and Wilbur F.

Storey were just rounding their interesting careers. George Harvey was flashing across our local horizon on his way to New York. M. E. Stone was hacking out of one newspaper office in order to a.s.sume general supervision of all the newspapers in the world. Vance Thompson wrote for an evening paper. Opie Read was up and down the street, working as little as possible. William Elroy Curtis had just served a term as society editor of the _Inter Ocean_. Paul Potter was tied to an editorial desk, but already he had heard the call of the stage and was getting ready to write _Trilby_. Will Payne, Kennett Harris, Ray Stannard Baker, Forrest Crissy, Emerson Hough, and other contributors to the five- and ten-cent beacons of the present day were humbly contributing to the daily press. Ben King was writing his quiet verse and peddling it around. Eugene Field had come on from Kansas City and was trying to weave _Culture's Garland_, in spite of the fact that the high wind constantly disarranged his material. Julian Street was still operating as an amateur, while Henry Hutt and the Leyendecker boy and Pennrhyn Stanlaws and other ill.u.s.trators who have brought the show girl into the home life of America were students at the Art Inst.i.tute, over on the lake front. Do you recognize some of the names? Most of them are now typical New Yorkers--born west of Kalamazoo.

It was in 1890 that John T. McCutcheon came up from Indiana and broke into the old _News_ office. Perhaps you know that later on he became the Thomas Nast of the corn belt--one of the few cartoonists with a really definite influence and a loyal following. Tom Powers was just beginning to draw his comics.

Shortly before Melville Stone escaped from bondage he received a call at his office from a talented young woman who acted on the stage. I am not repeating any ancient scandal. I am simply telling you the facts. The young actress showed the great editor some verses which had been dedicated to her by a lad living on the West Side. Mr. Stone sent for the young man and put him to work, and the next morning he knew the young man had written _Robin Hood_, and since then he has written most of the plays with music presented anywhere in America. You must have seen the name of Harry B. Smith on the billboards.

A young person with very red hair did general hustling on the _Inter Ocean_ for a short time and then disappeared. Years later he bobbed up in congress as a member from Kansas and began to shout defiance at Uncle Joe Cannon. The young person's name was Victor Murdock.

It was during this same golden age that an overgrown and diffident young man came from an obscure town in Illinois and was given a tryout on the _Tribune_. He was steady and industrious and ever willing, and they set him to do hotel reporting. He was a failure as a hotel reporter, because the young men employed by the _Herald_ and _Times_ secured interviews every day with interesting visitors whom he was never able to find. He could not find them because those interesting persons did not exist. They were created by the enterprising young men of the _Times_ and _Herald_ who were working in combination against the _Tribune_.

Each morning the _Herald_ and _Times_ would have a throbbing story told by some traveler who had shot big game in India, or penetrated the frozen north, or visited the interior of Tibet, or observed the habits of the kangaroo in Australia.

The visitor who told the wondrous tales of adventure invariably left in the afternoon for New York, but his name was on the hotel register as a corroborative detail intended to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Perhaps I should explain that the hotel clerk was a party to the conspiracy.

Every day the _Tribune_ young man was rebuked because he had been scooped by the _Times_ and the _Herald_. He ran from hotel to hotel, frantically eager to do his duty, but he never could find the African explorer and the t.i.tled European and the North Sea adventurer who told their breathless tales day after day in the columns of the rival papers. So the _Tribune_ young man was taken off hotels and put on finance. After that he was not scooped. He came to know Lyman J. Gage and moved on to New York via Washington. To-day the poor young man who failed as a hotel reporter because he lacked the gift of imaginative fiction is president of the National City Bank of New York. Perhaps you have heard of him. His name is Frank Vanderlip.

Now let us inquire as to the designing scribblers who caused him to lose his job. The _Times_ man is here in New York as first aid to the tired business man. The next time you visit "Chin Chin" or the Hippodrome you will notice the name of Charles B.

Dillingham on the program. As for the _Herald_ young man, you must know something about him if you have read _Mr. Dooley_.

It was about 1890 that the sprightly organization known as the Whitechapel Club came into existence in Chicago. Moses P. Handy was an adopted son of the same period. He had come on from Philadelphia and was trying to introduce the custom of wearing evening clothes in the evening. Chicago had started to build the Columbian Exposition and was trying hard to prove that a provincial city could be cosmopolitan while company was present.

Thus many influences worked together to make Chicago a rather interesting preparatory school in 1890.

If you will go over the list of young men who wrote for Chicago newspapers twenty-five years ago you will be convinced that the newspaper business is the greatest business in the world for getting out of. Let us here resolve to treat the reporter kindly, because in a few years we may be working for him.

Of all that untried host standing in line to receive a.s.signments, I don't suppose any one man was a greater disappointment to prophets than Brand Whitlock. When he came up from a freshwater college in Ohio and quietly attached himself to the _Herald_ staff he attracted attention almost immediately as a humorist. He specialized on "Josh stuff." He wrote bantering, fantastic, mock-serious stories of the kind that were standardized by Mr. Dana's young men. He was a star reporter, pulling down his thirty-five per; but any first-cla.s.s horoscoper would have allowed that Whitlock was destined to contribute to _Puck_ and _Judge_, and probably attempt the libretto of a comic opera. He legged it on the newspaper for a while and then re-deserted, the same as most of the others, and went to Springfield to resume his studies. This was his first erratic move. If he had been a true journalist there wouldn't have been anything more for him to learn. Then he published _The Thirteenth District_. Many of his old friends bought it expecting to get something on the order of refined vaudeville, but found, instead, a true and tragic story of cheap ambitions.

Well, we watched him as mayor of Toledo, and we have been telling everybody for the last year and a half that we did a.s.signments together and are members of the same college fraternity and wouldn't be afraid to go right up and speak to him anywhere.

To that scattered colony of twenty-five years ago I bring the a.s.surance that we are proud of Brand Whitlock and are glad to call him our friend.

2. Brand Whitlock, American minister to Belgium, was the princ.i.p.al guest at a private banquet given by the Lotos Club at its home, 110 West Fifty-seventh Street, last night. It was described by a prominent member of the club as a "banquet that was not attended by any man prominent in politics, but one that was intended to do honor to Mr. Whitlock and to drink a little wine and to eat a little breast of guinea."

Politics and newspaper reporters were barred, and Whitlock in his address made no reference to the European war or to the situation in Belgium. "American Ideals" was the subject of the address, and he referred to the inscription on Washington Arch, in Washington Square, which says, "Let us here erect a standard to which all the wise and honest may repair."

"That is a sentence of which I like to think," Mr. Whitlock said. "It is a standard which to be effective must be erected in the life of each citizen, and no one can erect it there but himself. In no citizen did it ever attain such beautiful and symmetrical proportions as in the life of Lincoln.

"Once in a foreign city I happened to pick up a penny in the street. It was one of those that bear Lincoln's head. Looking at it and thinking of its implications, the thought of home and all that it brought up, the thought of all the hands through which it had pa.s.sed--hands of workmen, the hands of little children, the hands of beggars, even; hard hands and gnarled hands and honest hands, the hands of mine own people--it seemed to me to have been made precious by the patina of democracy, and I thought that nothing could have been more beautiful and significant than that Lincoln's n.o.ble head should have been engraved on our smallest coin, a token of our universal daily need in hands that humbly break the bread their toil has earned.

That head to me somewhat palpably wore the people's love like purple bays--the love of all those common people whom he so wisely loved and bore in sorrow in his mighty heart.

"In him, as I have tried to say, the American ideal was most perfectly exemplified, and it was exemplified in him because after the illusions of life had gone he retained his ideals and his faith in them. It was thus exemplified in him because in addition to his wisdom, his gentleness, his patience, his hope, and his faith, he had that other great American quality of humor, which saved him in every situation, and by American humor I mean that instinctive sense of human values that enables one to see all things or most things in their proper relations, and so becomes an integral part of the American ideal."

Four hundred fifty members of the club and their friends were at the banquet. At the table with Whitlock were Dr. M. Woolsey Stryker, president of Hamilton College; M. A. Van der Vyede, Belgian Minister of Finance; Nathaniel C. Wright, editor of the Toledo _Blade_; Rev. Dr. Leighton Parks, Melville E. Stone, George Ade, and Hewitt H. Howland, of Indiana, all of whom spoke.

Mr. Whitlock was introduced by Chester S. Lord, vice president of the club, who presided in the absence of President F. R.

Lawrence, who was ill. Lord reviewed briefly some of the work of Whitlock in Belgium, where he worked "with a fidelity and a fairness and a supreme regard for the interests of humanity that have won for him the praise and the admiration of the entire world."

Speaking to Mr. Whitlock, Mr. Lord said: "The neutral nations esteem you and love you. The belligerent nations admire and respect you. No one could have addressed himself to this task with greater loyalty, fidelity, or patriotism."

_B._ Do you find the following story meritorious or blameworthy? Why?

_MRS. PALTIER "NOT AT HOME"_

Mrs. Laura Paltier, who has just returned from Florida, was "not at home" to reporters yesterday. They wanted to ask her several questions about the $20,000 exposition fund now in her charge.

A maid answered the doorbell at 4356 Lake Erie Drive.

"Is Mrs. Paltier at home?"

"Who is it wants to see her?"

"_The Tribune_." The maid closed the door, leaving the reporter on the porch. Five minutes later she returned. "Mrs. Paltier is not at home. I don't know where she is nor when she will return." She closed the door.

The reporter went to a telephone. "Is Mrs. Paltier at home?"

The maid's voice answered: "I will see." For a minute two voices could be heard at the other end of the wire.

"Who is this, please?" asked the maid. Upon learning the ident.i.ty of the inquirer she said: "No, Mrs. Paltier is not at home."

About that time the reporter decided that Mrs. Paltier was not eager to see him.

_C._ Special a.s.signments, such as reporting sermons, local addresses, commercial banquets, etc., may be taken as additional exercises for this chapter.

_CHAPTER XV_

_A._ From the following details write for a New York morning paper a story of the death of Tom Hilton:

Time and place of death, yesterday at the New York hospital; age, 36; occupation, s.e.xton at Christ Church on West Thirty-sixth Street; attending physician, Dr. Henry Adair; cause of death, swallowing false teeth while at breakfast with his wife yesterday; efforts to save him: Dr. Adair summoned immediately, incision made in throat, silver tube inserted to allow pa.s.sage of air to the lungs, and operation later at hospital. Patient failed to rally after operation. Survivors: wife and two children.

_B._ From the following details write for a Chicago evening paper a story of the fire that destroyed the plant of the W. M. Welch Manufacturing Company, makers of college and preparatory school diplomas: