CHAPTER XVII

SOME GENIUS IN AN OLD ROOM

_Lord, Managing Editor for Thirty-Turn Years.--Clarke, Magician of the Copy Desk.--Ethics, Fair Play and Democracy.--“The Evening Sun” and Those Who Make It._

For forty-seven years the city or news room of the _Sun_ was on the third floor of the brick building at the south corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets, a five-story house built for Tammany Hall in 1811, when that organization found its quarters in Martling’s Tavern--a few doors south, on part of the site of the present Tribune Building--too small for its robust membership.

In the days of Grand Sachems William Mooney, Matthew L. Davis, Lorenzo B. Shepard, Elijah F. Purdy, Isaac V. Fowler, Nelson J. Waterbury, and William D. Kennedy, and the big and little bosses, including Tweed, this third-floor room had been used as a general meeting-hall. It was here, in 1835, that the Locofoco--later the Equal Rights--party was born after a conflict in which the regular Tammany men, finding themselves in the minority, turned off the gas and left the reformers to meet by the light of locofoco matches. It was a room from which many a Democrat was hurled because he preferred De Witt Clinton to Tammany’s favourite, Martin Van Buren. Two flights of long, straight stairs led to the ground floor. They were hard to go up; they must have been extremely painful to go down bouncing.

It was a long, wide, barnlike room, lighted by five windows that looked upon Park Row and the City Hall. The stout old timbers were bare in the ceiling and in them were embedded various hooks and ring-bolts to which, once upon a time, was attached gymnasium apparatus used by a _turn verein_, which hired the room when the Tammanyites did not need it.

It was not a beautiful room. Mr. Dana never did anything to improve it except in a utilitarian way, and from the time when he bought the building from the Tammany Society, in 1867, until it was torn down in 1915, the old place looked very much the same. Of course, new gas-jets were added, these to be followed by electric-light wires, until the upper air had a jungle-like appearance, and there were rude, inexpensive desks and telephone-booths.

The floor was efficient, for it was covered with rubber matting that deadened alike the quick footstep of Dana and the thundering stride of pugilistic champions who came in to see the sporting editor. But the city room’s only ornaments were men and their genius. Here wrote Ralph and Chamberlin, Spears and Irwin, and all the rest of the fine reporters of the old building’s years.

Near the windows of this shabby room were the desks of the men who planned news-hunts, chose the hunters, and mounted their trophies. Six desks handled all the news-matter in the old city room of the _Sun_. The managing editor sat at a roll-top in the northwest corner, near a door that led to Mr. Dana’s room. A little distance to the east was the night editor’s desk. At the large flat-top desk near the managing editor three men sat--the cable editor, who handled all foreign news; the “Albany man,” who edited articles from the State and national capitals and all of New York State; and the telegraph editor, who took care of all other wire matter.

In the southwest corner of the room was a double desk at which the city editor sat from 10 A.M. until 5 P.M., when the night city editor came in. Next to the city editor’s desk was the roll-top of the assistant city editor, also used by the assistant night city editor. Beyond that was the desk of the suburban or “Jersey” editor. Nearest the door, so that the noise of ten-thousand-dollar challenges to twenty-round combat would not disturb the whole room, was the desk of the sporting editor.

In the fifty years that have passed since Dana bought the _Sun_, the changes in the heads of the news departments have been comparatively few. True, the news office has not been as fortunate as the editorial rooms, where only three men, Charles A. Dana, Paul Dana, and Edward P. Mitchell, have been actual editors-in-chief; but the list of managing editors and night city editors is not long. Before the day of Chester S. Lord, the managing editors were, in order: Isaac W. England, Amos J. Cummings, William Young, and Ballard Smith. Since Lord’s retirement the managing editors have been James Luby, William Harris, and Keats Speed.

The city editors have been John Williams, Larry Kane, W. M. Rosebault, William Young, John B. Bogart (1873–1890), Daniel F. Kellogg (1890–1902), George B. Mallon (1902–1914), and Kenneth Lord, the present city editor, a son of Chester S. Lord.

The night city editors before the long reign of Selah Merrill Clarke--of whom more will be said presently--were Henry W. Odion, Elijah M. Rewey, and Ambrose W. Lyman, all of whom had previously been _Sun_ reporters, and all of whom remained with the _Sun_, in various capacities, for many years. Rewey was the exchange editor from 1887 to 1903, and was variously employed at other important desk posts until his death in 1916. Since Mr. Clarke’s retirement, in 1912, the night city editors have been Joseph W. Bishop, J. W. Phoebus, Eugene Doane, Marion G. Scheitlin, and M. A. Rose.

The night editors of the _Sun_, whose function it is to make up the paper and to “sit in” when the managing editors are absent, have been Dr. John B. Wood, the “great American condenser”; Garret P. Serviss, now with the _Evening Journal_; Charles M. Fairbanks, Carr V. Van Anda (1893–1904), now managing editor of the New York _Times_; George M. Smith (1904–1912), the present managing editor of the _Evening Sun_; and Joseph W. Bishop.

In the eighties, the nineties, and the first decade of the present century the front corners of the city room were occupied, six nights a week, by two men closely identified with the _Sun’s_ progress in getting and preparing news. These, Chester S. Lord and S. M. Clarke, were looked up to by _Sun_ men, and by Park Row generally, as essential parts of the _Sun_.

Lord, through his city editors, reporters, and correspondents, got the news. If it was metropolitan news--and until the latter days of July, 1914, New York was the news-centre of the world, so far as American papers were concerned--Clarke helped to get it and then to present it after the unapproachably artistic manner of the _Sun_. In the years of Lord and Clarke more than a billion copies of the _Sun_ went out containing news stories written by men whom Lord had hired and whose work had passed beneath the hand of Clarke.

Chester Sanders Lord, who was managing editor of the _Sun_ from 1880 to 1913, was born in Romulus, New York, in 1850, the son of the Rev. Edward Lord, a Presbyterian clergyman who was chaplain of the One Hundred and Tenth Regiment of New York Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War. Chester Lord studied at Hamilton College in 1869 and 1870, and went from college to be associate editor of the Oswego _Advertiser_. In 1872 he came to the _Sun_ as a reporter, and covered part of Horace Greeley’s campaign for the Presidency in that year. After nine months as a reporter he was assigned by the managing editor, Cummings, to the suburban desk, where he remained for four years.

In the fall of 1877 he bought the Syracuse _Standard_, but in six weeks he returned to the _Sun_ and became assistant night city editor under Ambrose W. Lyman, the predecessor of S. M. Clarke. Ballard Smith, who succeeded William Young as managing editor in 1878, named Lord as his assistant, and Lord succeeded Ballard Smith as managing editor on December 3, 1880.

For thirty-three years Lord inspected applicants for places in the news departments of the _Sun_, and decided whether they would fit into the human structure that Dana had built. Edward G. Riggs, who knew him as well as any one, has written thus of him:

Like Dana, he has been a great judge of men. His discernment has been little short of miraculous. Calm, dispassionate, without the slightest atom of impulse, as wise as a serpent and as gentle as a dove, Lord got about him a staff that has been regarded by newspapermen as the most brilliant in the country. Independent of thought, with a placid idea of the dignity of his place, ever ready to concede the other fellow’s point of view even though maintaining his own, Lord was never known in all the years of his managing editorship of the _Sun_ to utter an unkind word to any man on the paper, no matter how humble his station.

One of Lord’s notable performances as managing editor was the perfecting of the _Sun’s_ system of collecting election returns. Before 1880 the correspondents had sent in the election figures in a conscientious but rather inefficient manner--by towns, or cities. Lord picked out a reliable correspondent in each county of New York State and gave to the chosen man the responsibility of sending to the _Sun_, at nine o’clock on election night, an estimate of the result in his particular county. This was to be followed at eleven o’clock, if necessary, with the corrected figures.

“Don’t tell us how your city, or township, or village went,” he said to the correspondents. “Let us have your best estimate on the county. Don’t spare the telephone or the telegraph, either to collect the returns or to get them into the _Sun_ office.”

The telephone was just coming into general use for the transmission of news, and Lord saw its possibilities on an election night.

As a result of the new system, improved from year to year, the _Sun_ became what it is--the election-night authority on what has happened. So confident was the _Sun_ of its figures on the night of the Presidential election of 1884 that it, alone of all the New York papers, declared the next morning that Mr. Cleveland had defeated Mr. Blaine, although the _Sun_ had been one of the most strenuous opponents of the Democratic candidate. Blaine, who had wired to the _Sun_ for its estimates, got the first news of his defeat from Lord. Eight years later, when Mr. Cleveland defeated President Harrison, the winner’s political chief of staff, Daniel S. Lamont, received the first tidings of the great and unexpected victory from Mr. Lord.

In the late eighties the _Sun_ was supplementing its Associated Press news service with a valuable corps of special correspondents scattered all over America and Europe. The news received from these _Sun_ men led to the establishment, by William M. Laffan, then publisher of the _Sun_, of a _Sun_ news agency which was called the Laffan Bureau. This service, originated for the purpose of covering special events in the live way of the _Sun_, was suddenly called upon to cover the whole news field of the world in a more comprehensive way.

Lord’s part in this work, when Dana decided to break with the Associated Press, has been graphically described by Mr. Riggs:

“Chester,” said Mr. Dana one afternoon early in the nineties, leaning over Lord’s desk, “I have just torn up my Associated Press franchise. We’ve got to have the news of the world to-morrow morning, and we’ve got to get it ourselves.”

“Don’t let that fret you, Mr. Dana,” replied Lord. “You’ve got a Dante class on hand to-night. You just go home and enjoy yourself. I’ll have the news for you all right.”

Dana always said that he didn’t enjoy his Dante class a single bit that night; but he didn’t go near the _Sun_ office, neither did he communicate with the office. He banked on Lord, and the next morning and ever afterward Lord made good on the independent service. He built up the Laffan Bureau, which more recently has become the Sun News Service, and the special correspondents of the paper in all parts of the world see to it that the _Sun_ gets the news.

A task like that which Dana thrust on Lord might have paralyzed the average managing editor of a great metropolitan newspaper confronted by keen and powerful competitors. It was unheard of in journalism. It had never been attempted before. Lord, with calm courage and confidence, sent off thousands of telegrams and cable despatches that night. Many were shots in the air, but the majority were bull’s-eyes, as the next morning’s issue of the _Sun_ proved.

Was Dana delighted? If you had seen him hop, skip, and jump into the office that morning, you’d have received your answer. When Lord turned up at his desk in the afternoon, Dana rushed out from his chief editor’s office, grasped him about the shoulders, and chuckled:

“Chester, you’re a brick, you’re a trump. You’re the John L. Sullivan of newspaperdom!”

The Laffan Bureau, which assimilated the old United Press, became a news syndicate the service of which was sought by dozens of American papers whose editors admired the _Sun’s_ manner of handling news. The Laffan Bureau lasted until 1916, when the _Sun_, through its purchase by Frank A. Munsey, absorbed Mr. Munsey’s New York _Press_, which had the Associated Press service.

Among Mr. Lord’s fortunate traits as managing editor were his ability to choose good correspondents all over the world and his entire confidence in them after they were selected. No matter what other correspondents wrote, the _Sun_ stood by its own men. They were on the spot; they should know the truth as well as any one else could.

Months before Aguinaldo’s insurrection the _Sun_ man at Manila, P. G. McDonnell, kept insisting that the Filipino chieftain would revolt. The other New York newspapers laughed at the _Sun_ for seeing ghosts, but McDonnell was right.

Newspaper readers will remember that in 1904 the fall of Port Arthur was announced three or four times in about as many months, and each time the _Sun_ appeared to be beaten on the news until the next day, when it was discovered that the Russians were still holding out. All the _Sun_ did about the matter was to notify its Tokyo correspondent, John T. Swift, that when Port Arthur really fell it would expect to hear from him by cable at “double urgent” rates. At midnight of January 1, 1905, four months after these instructions were given to Swift, the _Sun_ got a “double urgent” message:

Port Arthur fallen--SWIFT.

No other paper in New York had the news. The _Sun_ rubbed it in editorially on January 3:

Deeply conscious as we are of the deplorable lack of modern enterprise which has hitherto deprived the _Sun_ of the distinction of repeatedly announcing the fall of Port Arthur, we have to content ourselves with the reflection that when finally the _Sun_ did print the fall of Port Arthur, it was so.

Soon after the election of Woodrow Wilson, in 1912, the head of the _Sun_ bureau in Washington, the late Elting A. Fowler, made the prediction that William Jennings Bryan would be named as Secretary of State. Nearly every other metropolitan newspaper either ignored the story, or ridiculed it as absurd and impossible. The _Sun_ never made inquiry of Fowler as to the source of his information. He had been a _Sun_ man for ten years, and that was enough. Fowler repeated and reiterated that Bryan would be the head of the new Cabinet, and sure enough, he was.

The _Sun_ correspondent in a city five hundred miles from New York was covering a great murder mystery. Every other New York newspaper of importance had sent from two to five men to handle the story; the _Sun_ sent none. The correspondent saw that the New York men were getting sheaves of telegrams from their newspapers, directing them in detail how to tell the story, and to what length; so he sent a message to the _Sun_ advising it of the large numbers of New York reporters engaged on the mystery, and of the amount of matter they were preparing to send. Had the _Sun_ any instructions for him? Yes, it had. The reply came swiftly:

Use your own judgment--CHESTER S. LORD.

That was the _Sun_ way, and the _Sun_ printed the correspondent’s stories, whether they were one column long, or six. The _Sun_ could not see how an editor in New York could know more about a distant murder than a correspondent on the spot.

It was the _Sun’s_ way, once a man was taken on, to keep him as long as it could. One day Mr. Lord sent for Samuel Hopkins Adams, then a reporter, and asked him whether he would like to go away fishing.

“A Sunday story?” inquired Adams.

“No, not exactly,” said Mr. Lord. “A vacation, rather. You’ve been fired. Go away, but come back, say, next Tuesday, and go to work, and it’ll be all right. Don’t worry!”

Adams learned that a suit for libel had been brought against the paper by an individual who had been made an unpleasant figure in a police story which Adams had written.

A few days after Adams returned to his duties Mr. Dana came out of his room and asked the city editor, Mr. Kellogg, the name of the reporter who had written an article to which he pointed. Kellogg told Dana that Adams was the author, and Dana strode across the room and bestowed upon the reporter one of his brief and much prized commentaries of approval. Then he looked at Adams more closely, and, with raised eyebrows, walked to the managing editor’s desk.

“Who is that young man?” he asked Mr. Lord, indicating Adams with a movement of the head.

Mr. Lord murmured something.

“Didn’t I order him discharged a few days ago?” said Mr. Dana.

Another but more prolonged murmur from Mr. Lord. Adams got up from his desk to efface himself, but as he left the room he caught the voice of Mr. Dana, a trifle higher and a bit plaintive:

“Why is it, Mr. Lord, that I never succeed in discharging any of your bright young men?”

Adams did not wait for the answer.

This story, while typical of Lord, is not typical of Dana. For every word of censure he had a hundred words of praise. He read the paper--every line of it--for virtues to be commended rather than for faults to be condemned.

“Who wrote the two sticks about the lame girl? A good touch; that’s the _Sun_ idea!”

If a new man had written something he liked--even a ten-line paragraph--the editor of the _Sun_ would cross the room to shake the man’s hand and say:

“Good work!”

The spirit he radiated was contagious. The men, encouraged by Dana, spread faith to one another. The “_Sun_” spirit--the envious of other newspapers were wont to refer to those who had it as “the _Sun’s_ Mutual Admiration Society”--did and does much to make the _Sun_. The men lived the socialism of art. If a new reporter received a difficult assignment, ten older men were ready to tell him, in a kindly and not at all didactic way, how to find the short cut.

Perhaps some part of the democracy of the _Sun_ office has come from the fact that men have rarely been taken in at the top. It was Dana’s plan to catch young men with unformed ideas of journalism and make _Sun_ men of them. They went on the paper as cubs at fifteen dollars a week--or even as office-boys--and worked their way to be “space men,” if they had it in their noddles.

All space men were free and equal in the Jeffersonian sense. Their pay was eight dollars a column. That one man made one hundred and fifty dollars in a week when his neighbour made only fifty was usually the result, not of the system, but of the difference between the men. Some were harder workers than others, or better fitted by experience for more important stories; and some were born money-makers. If a diligent reporter, through no fault of his own, was making small “bills,” the city editor would see to it that something profitable fell to him--perhaps a long and easily written Sunday article.

Through changed conditions in newspaper make-up and policies, the space system in the payment of reporters is now practically extinct. It had good points and bad ones. Undoubtedly it developed a large number of men to whom a salary would not have been attractive. Some, to whose style and activities the space system lent itself, remained in the profession longer than they would otherwise have stayed. On the other hand, it was not always fair to reporters with whom a condensed style was natural. The dynamics of a two-inch article, the very value of which lies in its brevity, cannot be measured with a space-rule.

The _Sun’s_ ideas of fairness do not end with itself and its men. It has always had a proper consideration for the feelings of the innocent bystander. It never harms the weak, or stoops to get news in a dishonourable or unbecoming way. It would be hard to devise a set of rules of newspaper ethics, but a few examples of things that the _Sun_ doesn’t do may illuminate.

Soon after one of the _Sun’s_ most brilliant reporters had come on the paper, he was sent to report the wedding of a noted sporting man and a famous stage beauty, the marriage ceremony being performed by a picturesque Tammany alderman. The reporter returned to the office with a lot of amusing detail, which he recited in brief to the night city editor.

“Just the facts of the marriage, please,” said Mr. Clarke. “The two most important events in the life of a woman are her marriage and her death. Neither should be treated flippantly.”

Another reporter wrote an amusing story about a fat policeman posted at the Battery, who chased a tramp through a pool of rain-water. The policeman fell into the water, and the tramp got away. No report of the occurrence was made at police headquarters, but a _Sun_ man saw the incident and wrote it.

“It’s an amusing story,” said Clarke to the reporter, “but they read the papers at police headquarters, and this policeman may be put on trial for not reporting the escape of the hobo. Suppose we drop this classic on the floor?”

A telegraph messenger-boy once wrote a letter to the police commissioner, telling him how to break up the cadets (panders) of the East Side. A _Sun_ man found the lad and got an interesting interview with him.

“Leave my name out, won’t you?” the messenger said to the reporter. “If you print it, I may lose my job.”

He was told that his name was known in the _Sun_ office, but that the reporter would present his appeal.

“Did you find the messenger?” Clarke asked the reporter on his arrival.

The _Sun_ man replied that he had found him, and that the interview was interesting and exclusive. Before he had an opportunity to repeat the boy’s plea for anonymity, Clarke said:

“Is it going to hurt the boy if we print his name? If it is, leave it out, and refer to him by a fictitious number.”

Two reporters, one from the _Sun_ and one from another big daily, went one night to interview a famous man on an important subject. The _Sun_ man returned and wrote a brief story containing none of the big news which it had been hoped he might get. The other newspaper came out with some startling revelations, gleaned from the same interview. Mr. Lord showed the rival paper’s article to the _Sun_ reporter, with a mild inquiry as to the reason for the _Sun’s_ failure to get the news.

“We both gave our word,” said the reporter, “that we would keep back that piece of news for three days, even from our offices.”

“Son,” said Mr. Lord, “you are a great man!”

That was the Lord phrase of acquittal.

One of the big occurrences in the investigation of the life-insurance companies in 1905 was a report which was read to the investigating committee in executive session. Every newspaper yearned for the contents of the document. After the committee adjourned, a member of it whispered to a _Sun_ reporter:

“There is a bundle of those reports just inside the door of the committee room. I should think that five dollars given to a scrub-woman would probably get a copy for you.”

The _Sun_ man, knowing the value of the report, and not content to act on his own estimate of _Sun_ ethics, telephoned the temptation to the city editor, Mr. Mallon.

“A _Sun_ man who would do that would lose his job,” was the instant decision.

A couple of days after Stephen Tyng Mather, recently First Assistant Secretary of the Interior, went on the _Sun_ as a reporter, the city editor, Mr. Bogart, called him to his desk.

“Mr. Mather,” said Bogart, “an admirer of the _Sun_ has sent me a turkey. Of course, I cannot accept it. Please take it to his house in Harlem and explain why; but don’t hurt his feelings.”

Mather had just come from college, where he had never learned that the ethics of journalism might require a reporter to become a deliverer of poultry, but he took the turkey. It does not detract from the moral of the story to say that Mather and another young reporter, neither quite understanding the _Sun’s_ stern code, took the bird to the Fellowcraft Club and had it roasted--a fact of which Mr. Bogart may have been unaware until now.

The best news-handler that journalism has seen, Selah Merrill Clarke, was night city editor of the _Sun_ for thirty-one years. He came to the paper in 1881 from the New York _World_, where he had been employed as a reporter, and later as a desk man. In the early seventies he wrote for the _World_ a story of a suicide, and one of the newspapers of that day said of it that neither Dickens nor Wilkie Collins, with all the time they could ask, could have surpassed it. His story of the milkman’s ride down the valley of the Mill River, warning the inhabitants that the dam had broken at the Ashfield reservoir, near Northampton, Massachusetts (May 16, 1874), was another classic that attracted the attention of editors, including Dana.

Clarke never thought well of himself as a reporter, and often said that in that capacity he was a failure. As a judge of news values, or news presentation, or as a giver of the fine literary touch which lent to the _Sun’s_ articles that indescribable tone not found in other papers, Clarke stood almost alone.

The city editor of a New York newspaper sows seeds; the night city editor re-seeds barren spots, waters wilting items, and cuts and bags the harvest. The city editor sends men out all day for news; the night city editor judges what they bring in, and decides what space it shall have. In the handling of a big story, on which five or fifteen reporters may be engaged, the night city editor has to put together as many different writings in such a way that the reader may go smoothly from beginning to end. Chance may decree that the poorest writer has brought in the biggest news, and the man on the desk must supply quality as well as judgment.

At such work Clarke was a master. It has been said of him that by the eliding stroke of his pencil and the insertion of perhaps a single word he could change the commonplace to literature. No reporter ever worked on the _Sun_ but wished, at one time or another, to thank Clarke for saving him from himself. Clarke had the faculty of seeing instantly the opportunity for improvement that the reporter might have seen an hour or a day later.

Clarke got about New York very little, but he knew the city from Arthur Kill to Pelham Bay; knew it just as a general at headquarters knows the terrain on which his troops are fighting, but which he himself has never seen. He had the map of New York in his brain. When an alarm of fire came in from an obscure corner, he knew what lumber-yards or oil-refineries were near the blaze, and whether that was a point where the water pressure was likely to fail.

Clarke’s memory was uncanny; it seemed to have photographed every issue of the _Sun_ for years. It was a saying that while Clarke stayed the _Sun_ needed neither an index nor a “morgue”--that biographical cabinet in which newspapers keep records of men and affairs.

Twenty-five years after the Beecher-Tilton trial a three-line death-notice came to Clarke’s desk. He read the dead man’s name and summoned a reporter.

“This man was a juror in the Beecher case,” said Clarke. “Look in the file of February 6 or 7, 1875, and I think you’ll find that this man stood up and made an interruption. Write a little piece about it.”

A _Sun_ man who reported the funeral of Russell Sage at Lawrence, Long Island, in July, 1906, returned to the office and told Mr. Clarke that an acquaintance of the Sage family had told him, on the train coming back, the contents of the old man’s will--a document for which the reading public eagerly waited. The reporter laid his informant’s card before the night city editor. Clarke studied the name on it for a minute, and then said:

“We won’t print the story. Dig out the file for June, 1899, and somewhere on the front page--I think it will be in the third or fourth column--on the 1st or 2nd of June you’ll find a story telling that this man was sent to Sing Sing for forgery.”

Clarke’s memory was right. Although it is anti-climactic to relate it, the ex-convict’s description of what the will contained was also correct.

Will Irwin, while reporting a small war between two Chinese societies, wrote an article one night about the arrest of two Hip Sing tong men who were wearing chain armour under their blouses. Clarke, much interested, asked Irwin all about the armour.

“It reminds me of ‘King Solomon’s Mines,’” remarked Irwin, “and the chain armour that the heroes had made in Sheffield to wear in Africa.”

“Yes,” replied Clarke, who had not read the Haggard novel in fifteen years; “but it wasn’t Sheffield--it was Birmingham.”

Clarke had a sense of responsibility that showed itself in nervousness. On a night when news was breaking, that nervousness was exhibited in his trips, every ten minutes, to the ice-water tank; in the constant lighting and relighting of his pipe; in the quick turn of his head at the approach of a reporter. Yet his nervousness was not contagious. So long as Clarke was nervous, the men under him felt that they need not be. He did all the worrying, and, unlike most worriers, got results from it.

Let him know that something had happened in the city, and his drag-net system was started. No matter how remote the happening, how apparently hopeless the clue, he let neither man nor telephone rest until every possible corner had been searched for the guilty news item. Once the situation was in hand he would return to the adornment of a head-line or the working out of some abstruse problem in mathematics--perhaps the angles of a sun-dial, for Clarke’s hobby was gnomonics, and he knew dials from Ptolemy’s time down. As a rest from mathematics he might write a limerick in Greek, and then carefully tear it up.

Almost every newspaper in New York tried, at one time or another, to take Clarke from the _Sun_. One night an emissary from one of the apostles of the then new journalism entered the _Sun_ office and sent his card to Mr. Clarke. When the night city editor appeared, he whispered:

“Mr. ---- says that if you’ll ascertain the highest salary the _Sun_ will pay you to stay, he’ll double it.”

Clarke uttered the strange sound that was his indulgence when disagreeably disturbed--a cross between a growl and a grunt--and turned back toward his desk.

“He’ll triple it!” cried the tempter.

Although Clarke heard the words, he kept on to his desk, and not only never mentioned the matter, but probably never thought of it again.

On another occasion he made a notable trip to the gate at the entrance to the big room. A drunken visitor was making the place ring with yells, and the office-boys could not stop him. Clarke bore the noise for ten minutes, and then, remarking, “This is unendurable!” went and threw the man down the stairs.

Clarke was the hero of a dozen newspaper stories, which he scorned to read.

“Do you know, Mr. Clarke,” said a reporter who did not know how shy “the boss” was, “that Blank has put you into a short story in _Space’s Magazine_?”

“Who is Blank?” said Clarke shortly.

“Why,” said his informant, “he worked here for several weeks.”

“Oh, Lord!” said Clarke. “I can’t be expected, can I, to remember all the geniuses that come and go?”

There was a mild ferocity about him that caused more than one cub to think that the night boss was unfriendly, but this attitude had a good effect. No young reporter ever made the same mistake twice.

“If you mean ‘child,’ write it so,” he would say. “Don’t write it ‘tot.’ And please have more variety in your motor cars. I have seen several that were not large and red and high-powered.”

The head-lines of the _Sun_ have been well written since the first days of Dana, and Clarke, for thirty years, was the best of the head-line writers. He wrote rhyming heads for Sam Wood’s prose verse, satirical heads for satires, humorous heads for the funny men’s articles. A _Sun_ reader could gauge almost exactly the worth of an article by the quality of the heading. A _Sun_ reporter could tell just what Clarke thought of his story by the cleverness of the lines that the night city editor wrote above it.

Clarke would put the obvious heading on a long, matter-of-fact yarn in two minutes, but he might spend half an hour--if he had it to spare--polishing a head for a short and sparkling piece of work. Two architects who did city work pleaded poverty, but admitted having turned over property to their wives. Clarke headed the story:

“We’re Broke,” Says Horgan.--“Sure,” Says Slattery, “But Our Wives Are Doing Fine.”

A brief item about the arrest of some boys for stealing five copies of “The Simple Life” he headed “Tempted Beyond Their Strength.” Over a paragraph telling of the killing of a Park Row newsboy by a truck he wrote: “A Sparrow Falls.”

Clarke had a besetting fear that Russell Sage would die suddenly late at night, and that the _Sun_ would not learn of it in time. Again and again false “hunches” caused him to send men to the Sage home on Fifth Avenue to discover the state of the old millionaire’s health. When Mr. Sage became seriously ill, reporters were sent in relays to watch the house. One man who had such an assignment turned up at the _Sun_ office at one o’clock in the morning.

“I left Mr. Sage’s house,” he explained to Clarke, “because Dr. Blank just came out and I had a little talk with him. He asked me if S. M. Clarke was still night city editor of the _Sun_; and when I told him that you were, he said:

“‘Tell Selah for me that I will call him personally on the ’phone if there is the least change in Mr. Sage’s condition. Selah and I are old friends; we used to be room-mates in college.’”

“Blank always was a darn liar!” said Mr. Clarke. “Go back to the house and sit on the door-step.”

On February 28, 1917, five years after Clarke retired, the Sun Alumni Association gave a dinner in his honour, with Mr. Lord presiding. Men came five hundred miles for the event, and the speeches were entirely about Clarke and his work. Mr. Clarke himself, who was only five miles away, sent a kindly letter to say that he was pleased, but that he could not imagine anything more absurd than a man’s attending a dinner given in his own honour.

Clarke was a factor in that nebulous institution so frequently referred to as the “_Sun_ school of journalism,” a college in which the teaching was by example rather than precept. Clarke occasionally told the young reporters how not to do it, but his real lessons were given in the columns of the _Sun_. There, in cold type, the man could see that Clarke had thrown his beautiful introduction on the floor, had lifted a word or a phrase from the middle of the article and put it to the fore, or had, by one of the touches which marked the great copy-reader’s genius, breathed life into the narrative. Clarke had no rules for improving a story, but he had a faculty, not uncommon among the finest copy-readers, of seeing an event more clearly than it had appeared to the reporter who described it, even when the desk man’s information came entirely from the reporter’s screed.

If a reporter found his story in the paper almost untouched by Clarke’s pencil and adorned with a typical Clarkean head, it was a signal to him that he had done well. He was sure not to get verbal approbation from Clarke. There is a legend that Clarke once cried “Fine!” after skimming over a sheet of well-written copy, but it is only a legend. With a reporter who never wrote introductions and never padded his articles Clarke would sometimes crack a joke. _Sun_ traditions have it that once, after a reporter had turned New York inside out to dig out a particularly difficult piece of news, the night city editor remarked to his assistant that that reporter “was a handy man to have around the office.” Although Clarke has been referred to by an excellent judge, Will Irwin, as “the greatest living schoolmaster of newspapermen,” his methods could never be adapted to the academies of journalism.

As a schoolmaster of a more positive type, _Sun_ men remember the late Francis T. Patton, who edited suburban news for twenty years. Staff men on assignments in New Jersey, Westchester, Long Island, and other places just beyond the city turned in their copy to “Boss” Patton, a cultured man who spent his spare hours reading old Latin works in the original or working out chess problems. It was to him that the bewildered cub turned in his hour of torment, and Patton would tell him how long his story ought to run, how he might begin it, how end it.

“I know it isn’t right to fake, Mr. Patton,” said a new reporter; “but is exaggeration never permissible?”

“It is,” said Patton. “You may use exaggeration whenever it is needed to convey to the reader an adequate but not exaggerated picture of the event you are describing. For instance, if you are reporting a storm at Seabright, and the waves are eight and one-half feet high by the tape which you surely carry in your hip-pocket for such emergencies, it will hardly do to inform the reader that the waves are eight and one-half feet high; his visualization of the scene would not be perfect. Yet, if you write that the waves ran mountain-high, I shall change your copy if it comes to me. The expression would be too stale. Hyperbole is one of the gifts.”

Patton’s droll humour was one of the delights of the _Sun_ office. One night Charles M. Fairbanks was writing, for the _Herald_, a story about “The Men Who Make the _Sun_ Shine.” He asked Patton for something about himself.

“You may say,” replied the boss of the suburban desk, “that my characteristics are brilliancy, trustworthiness, accuracy, and poetic fervour.”

“Boss,” said a young reporter to Mr. Patton, “I often think you and I could run this paper better than the men who are running it.”

“How strange!” said Mr. Patton, looking surprised. “I know that I could, but it has never occurred to me that you would not do worse than they do.”

The sports department has been one of the _Sun’s_ strongholds since Mr. Dana’s first years. Dana would let Amos Cummings give half a page to a race at Saratoga or Monmouth Park, and would encourage Amos to neglect his executive duties so that the paper might have a good report of a boxing-match. When William I lay dead in Berlin, the _Sun’s_ principal European correspondent, Arthur Brisbane, was concerned, not with the future of the continent, but with the aftermath of the Sullivan-Mitchell fight at Chantilly.

The stories of the international yacht-races have always been told best in the _Sun_, whether the reporter was John R. Spears or William J. Henderson. Mr. Henderson, who is the ablest musical critic in America, is probably the best yachting reporter, too. While the world of music knows him through his distinguished critiques, particularly of opera, the _Sun_ knows him as a great reporter--one who would rank high among the best it has ever had. Another _Sun_ man who wrote yachting well is Duncan Curry, later of the _American_.

In turf matters the _Sun_ has long been looked upon as an authority. In the heyday of racing the paper enjoyed the services of Christopher J. Fitzgerald, since then familiar as a starter on many race-tracks, and of Joseph Vila, now sporting editor of the _Evening Sun_. Fitzgerald, although a specialist in sports, was also a first-class general reporter. He is the hero of a story of the proverbial “_Sun_ luck,” which in this case might better be called _Sun_ persistence and activity.

In the latter part of December, 1892, the steamship Umbria, the fastest transatlantic boat of her day, was two weeks overdue at New York. Every newspaper had tugs out to watch for her first appearance. On the night of December 28 Fitzgerald was assigned to tug duty. The first tug he took down the moonlit bay broke her propeller in the ice; with the second tug he ran twenty miles beyond Sandy Hook. Presently an inward-bound liner appeared in the dark, and the other newspaper boats followed her; but this was not the Umbria, but the Britannic. An hour later a tank steamer came along, and Fitzgerald hailed her on the chance that she knew something about the missing ship.

“The Umbria,” came back the answer, “is about five miles astern, coming in slowly.”

The _Sun’s_ tug raced to sea and soon came alongside the overdue steamer. On board was Frank Marshall White, the _Sun’s_ London correspondent, and he had, all ready written, a story telling how the Umbria broke her machinery, and how the chief engineer lay on his back for five days trying to mend the break. Fitzgerald took White’s story and raced to Quarantine, where there was a telegraph-station, but, at that hour, no operator. Fitzgerald, himself an expert telegrapher, pounded the _Sun’s_ call, “SX,” for ten minutes, but the _Sun_ operator had gone home.

Fitzgerald returned to the tug and went under full speed to the Battery, landing at 3.35 A.M. Running to Park Row, he found an assistant foreman of the _Sun_ composing-room enjoying his lemonade in Andy Horn’s restaurant. This man rounded up four or five printers, and they began setting up the story at 4 A.M. The _Sun_ had a complete and exclusive story, and twenty thousand copies were sold of Fitzgerald’s extra.

Vila, like Fitzgerald a man of large physique and a former athlete, wrote the descriptions of a dozen Suburban Handicaps and Futurities, of a score of great college rowing-matches, of a thousand baseball and football games. Damon Runyon, the poet and sporting editor, once remarked that “Vila is the only sporting writer I have ever seen who knows exactly, at the end of a sporting event, just what he is going to write, when he is going to write it, and how much he is going to write.”

When John W. Gates and John A. Drake came to the New York race-tracks and made bets of sensational magnitude, Vila was the only turf reporter able to give the exact figures of the amounts bet by the Western plungers. The printing of these in the _Sun_ so aroused the Jockey Club that a curb was put on big betting.

The present sports staff includes some of the writers, like Nat Fleischer, “Daniel,” Frederick G. Lieb, and George B. Underwood, who were on the big sports staff of the New York _Press_ when that paper was amalgamated with the _Sun_.

Returning to the big, bare room in the old Sun Building, cast the eye of memory through the thin forest of chandeliers entwined with lianas of electric wiring, and across the dull desks. Boss Lord has come in from dinner and is reading telegraphic bulletins from out-of-town correspondents or glancing at a growing pile of proofs. At the Albany desk Deacon Stillman is editing a batch of Congress news from Walter Clarke or Richard V. Oulahan in Washington, or of legislative news from Joseph L. McEntee in Albany, or is trying to think out an apt head for a double murder in Herkimer County. At the cable desk Cyrus C. Adams, long secretary of the American Geographical Society, is looking in a guide-book to discover whether the name of a street in Naples has not been distorted by the operators while in transit between the Rome correspondent and New York. The telegraph editor is telling the night editor, Van Anda or Smith, that he has “nothing much but yellow fever,” and the night editor is replying that “three-quarters of a column of yellow fever will be plenty.”

At the city desk Clarke, who has half finished the heading on a bit about a green heron seen in Bronx Park, picks up the telephone to tell an East Side police-station reporter to investigate the report of an excursion boat gone aground on Hart’s Island, and then turns away to tell Ralph, or Chamberlin, or Joseph Fox, or Irwin, or Hill, or O’Malley, that a column and a half lead will do for the police investigation, or the great public dinner, or whatever his task may have been. As he finishes, a reporter lays on his desk a long story, and Clarke, reading the substance of the first page of it in an instant, hands it over to his assistant to edit.

At the Jersey desk Boss Patton has polished the disquisitions of a suburban correspondent on the antics of a shark in Barnegat Bay, and is explaining to a space man, almost with tears, why it was necessary to cut down his article about the picnic of the Smith family at Peapack.

The sporting editor, John Mandigo, has just bade good night to some distinguished visitor--say Mr. Fitzsimmons--and is bending over some copy from Fitzgerald or Vila. Perhaps Henry of Navarre and Domino are nose-and-nose in the stretch at Gravesend, or Amos Rusie has struck out seventeen opposing batters, or Kid Lavigne has lambasted Joe Walcott quite properly at Maspeth.

At a side desk a copy-reader on local news is struggling with a mass of writing from various youthful reporters. “At seven ten o’clock last evening, as Policeman McGuffin was patrolling his beat, his attention was attracted by a cry of fire,” etc. The copy-reader knows that smoke will presently issue from the upper windows; knows, too, that he presently will boil the seven pages down to three lines and gently tell the reporter why he did it.

The chess expert is turning a cabalistic cablegram from St. Petersburg into a detailed story of the contest between a couple of the masters of the game. The bowling man is writing a description, which may never see the light, of a desperate struggle between the Harlem Pin Kings and the Bensonhurst Alley Scorchers. H. L. Fitzpatrick is writing a golf story with such magnificent technique that Mandigo will not dare to cut a line out of it.

A dozen reporters, great and small, are at the desks in the middle of the room, busy with pencils. In a side room three or four others, converts to the typewriter, are pounding out copy. In another room Riggs is dictating to a stenographer the day’s doings in political life.

Four or five “rewrite men,” the “long wait” and his helpers, the “short waits,” are slipping in and out of the telephone-booths, taking and writing news articles from twenty points in the city where the Mulberry Street reporter, the police-station reporters, the Tenderloin man--who covers the West Thirtieth Street police-station, the Broadway hotels, and the theatrical district--and the Harlem man are still busy gathering news.

From a room wisely distant comes the rattle of the telegraph. Half a dozen wires are bringing in the continent’s news. Half a dozen boys, spurred by their chief, Dan O’Leary, carry the typed sheets to the proper desks.

The dramatic critic comes in and sits down at his desk to write two-thirds of a column about a first performance. The music critic has sent down a brief notice of the night’s opera.

Most of the reporters finish their work and go out. One or two remain to write special articles for the Sunday papers. A sporting reporter is spinning a semi-fictional yarn of life in Chinatown. A police reporter is composing little classics of life in Dolan’s Park Row restaurant.

At one o’clock there is a rumbling of the presses in the basement, and soon copies of the first edition come to the desks of the news-masters. Lord suggests to the night editor a shift of front-page articles. Clarke, his pencil flashing, marks in additions to the story of a late accident. A cub waits patiently for a discarded paper, to see whether his piece has got in. An older reporter, who wrote the story in the first column of the first page, does not look at his own work, but turns to the sporting page to read the racing entries for the next day--his day off.

At 1.27 A.M. Clarke rises and goes home. At two o’clock Lord closes his desk. Most of the desk men disappear; the work is done. The night editor--Van Anda or the imperturbable Smith--remains at his desk, with the “long wait” reporter to bear him company. At half past three they also go, and the watchman begins to turn out the lights. Down below, the presses are tossing forth the product of a night’s work in the big, bare, old room.

A story of the _Sun_ would be incomplete without a sketch of its little sister. The _Evening Sun_ was established by Mr. Dana nearly twenty years after he bought the _Sun_. He saw a place for a one-cent evening newspaper, for the only journal of that description then published in New York was the _Daily News_, which was largely a class publication. The leading evening newspapers were the _Evening Post_, the _Commercial Advertiser_, and the _Mail and Express_, selling for three cents and catering to a highbrow or a partisan clientele.

The first _Evening Sun_ was issued on March 17, 1887, at an hour when the St. Patrick’s Day parade was being reviewed by Mayor Hewitt. With its four pages of six columns each, its brief, lively presentation of general news, and its low price, the paper was an immediate success--though not the success that it is to-day, with its sixteen pages, its wealth of special articles, and the many features that make it one of America’s best evening newspapers.

The new paper had no titular editor-in-chief. Mr. Dana was the editor of the _Sun_ and had the general guidance of the evening paper. Dana’s associate, the publisher of the _Sun_, William M. Laffan, took a deep interest in the welfare of the new venture, and the _Evening Sun_ was often referred to as his “baby.”

The first managing editor of the paper was Amos J. Cummings, with Allan Kelly as city editor and John McCormick as sporting editor. When Cummings went to Congress, E. J. Edwards took his place and remained as managing editor until August, 1889, when Arthur Brisbane returned from the post of London correspondent of the _Sun_ to manage the evening paper.

It was Brisbane who induced Richard Harding Davis, then a young reporter in Philadelphia, to come to New York. As Davis was walking up from the ferry one morning in October, 1889, on his way to take up his new duties, he was taken in hand, in City Hall Park, by a bunco-steerer. Davis listened to the man’s wiles, turned him over to the police of the City Hall station, and then hurried to the _Evening Sun_ office to write a story about it for the paper. Davis’s _Van Bibber_ stories, the first of his fiction to attract wide attention, were originally printed in the _Evening Sun_, in 1890. As a reporter under Brisbane, Davis picked up much of the information and experiences that coloured his fiction.

When Brisbane went to the Pulitzer forces, he was succeeded as managing editor by W. C. McCloy, who had been city editor, and who remained at the head of the news department for more than twenty years.

Jacob A. Riis, who had been the police-headquarters reporter of the _Tribune_ since 1877, went to the _Evening Sun_ in 1890, coincident with the publication of his first popular work, “How the Other Half Lives.” Other of his works, including “The Children of the Poor” and “Out of Mulberry Street,” were written while he was the chief police reporter of the _Evening Sun_. Riis’s work was valuable, not only to the paper, but to the city itself. His writings attracted the attention of Theodore Roosevelt when the future President was head of the police board of New York (1895–1897), and the men became close friends. Together they worked to improve conditions in the tenement districts, and Roosevelt called Riis “New York’s most useful citizen.”

Thomas M. Dieuaide, whose work for the _Sun_ in the Spanish War has been referred to in this volume, and who became city editor of the _Evening Sun_, was one of Riis’s colleagues. Dieuaide was the author of the _Evening Sun’s_ broadside against the black vice of the East Side. Printed in 1901, shortly before the beginning of a mayoralty campaign, it was a prime factor in the election of a reforming administration.

Richard Harding Davis was not the only fiction-writer to graduate from the _Evening Sun’s_ school. Irvin S. Cobb got his start in the North as an _Evening Sun_ reporter. He came to New York from Paducah, Kentucky, rented a hall room, and sat down and wrote to the managing editor of the _Evening Sun_ a letter of application so humorous that he was employed immediately. His report of the peace conference at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, following the Russo-Japanese War, attracted wide attention. Stephen French Whitman and Algernon Blackwood, the novelists, were also _Evening Sun_ men.

The _Evening Sun’s_ list of former dramatic critics includes Acton Davies and Edward Fales Coward, both playwrights, and Charles B. Dillingham, the theatrical manager. Arthur Woods, recently police commissioner of New York, and Robert Adamson, recently fire commissioner, were old _Evening Sun_ men. Frederick Palmer, Associated Press correspondent with the British forces in the great war, and Arthur Ruhl, a special correspondent at the front, are _Evening Sun_ alumni.

In the early years of the _Evening Sun_ the chief editorial writer was James T. Watkins, whom Mr. Laffan had known in California as a man of wide scholarship and an economic expert. He was so prolific that it was a common saying in the office that, with Watkins at his desk, the _Evening Sun_ needed no other writers of editorial articles. Frank H. Simonds, who had been an editorial writer for the _Sun_ since 1908, became chief editorial writer for the _Evening Sun_ in 1913. In 1914 his war articles attracted wide attention. He was afterward editor of the _Tribune_.

Other writers for the editorial page were Edward H. Mullin, an Irishman from Dublin, and Frederic J. Gregg. The chief editorial writer is now James Luby, who is assisted by an _Evening Sun_ veteran, Winfield S. Moody.

The managing editors since W. C. McCloy have been Charles P. Cooper, James Luby, and the present incumbent, George M. Smith, for many years night editor of the _Sun_, and its managing editor in the absence of Mr. Lord.

After Allan Kelly, the city editors were W. C. McCloy, Charles P. Cooper, Ervin Hawkins, Nelson Lloyd, and T. M. Dieuaide. Mr. Lloyd, who left the paper to write fiction, had served as city editor from 1897 to 1904.

The _Evening Sun_ has always had a particular appeal to the woman reader. Its first woman reporter, Miss Helen Watterson, of Cleveland, Ohio, was induced to come East in Brisbane’s régime to write a column called “The Woman About Town,” and ever since 1890 the staff of women writers on the paper has been increasing. The _Evening Sun_ has a page or two a day of feature articles written for women, by women, about women.

The financial and sports departments of the _Evening Sun_ make it a man’s paper, too. No home-going broker would dare to board the subway without a copy of the Wall Street edition of the _Evening Sun_. A large staff of sporting writers, captained by Joseph Vila, provides each day a page or two of authoritative athletic news.

The _Sun_ and the _Evening Sun_ are run as separate publications, each with a complete staff, but their presses and purposes are one.