Chapter VIII: Breaking Into Park Row

I never went back to the _Herald_. After my health was restored, or partly so, I went to New York from the seashore, drifted down to Park Row and was attracted by the gilded dome of the World building. The date was July 18, 1891.

I was familiar with the wonderful success of Joseph Pulitzer in New York and I was fascinated with this stupendous monument to his brains and energy. Acting entirely on impulse I went in, ascended to the dome and found my way to the office of Ballard Smith, at that time editor-in-chief. He was easily accessible. I started to introduce myself and relate to him my newspaper experience, but he cut me short by saying he knew of me and he almost took my breath away when he asked if I would accept a place on the staff. Would I join the staff of the New York _World_? I would have bartered ten years of my life for the chance. It was a realization of my fondest dream.

I had been told that one needed a jimmy to break into the organization of a New York newspaper, but here was an editor offering me a job before I even had time to apply.

I began work the following day. I hadn’t been there two weeks when Ballard Smith summoned me to his office to read a cable dispatch that had come from Paris. It was from Mr. Pulitzer, inquiring who it was that had written an account of a railroad wreck that appeared on the first page a few days after I came to the paper. Mr. Smith had replied, giving my name and the additional information that I was a new man, and the proprietor had directed him to convey his personal compliments to me and to present in his name a substantial cash reward. Before completing my first month I was made assistant city editor.

I had been there a little more than a year when poor health prompted me to take a trip to Colorado. Returning eastward, some months afterward, I stopped in St. Louis and met Florence White, now general manager of the New York _World_, at that time manager of the _Post-Dispatch_, the paper that was the foundation of the enormous fortune that Mr. Pulitzer afterward accumulated. Mr. Pulitzer left it in charge of subordinates when he went to New York and bought the bankrupt _World_, with the smallest circulation of any newspaper in the metropolis, and almost overnight transformed it into one of the most widely read and influential newspapers in America.

Mr. White offered me a job. I had always worked on a morning paper, with the attending long hours and little chance for home life and almost no recreation. The _Post-Dispatch_ was an afternoon paper and I realized that I would have all of my evenings to myself. To one recovering from a long spell of sickness it looked attractive, so I hung my coat on a peg and went to work. It wasn’t long before I was made city editor and I held the job until Mr. Pulitzer called me back to New York, four years later.

I was in St. Louis when a terrific tornado cut a great gash through the most thickly populated section of the city, destroying hundreds of lives and millions of dollars’ worth of property. And of the newspaper men there when the storm came tearing out of the west I was the most inactive. That afternoon, when my work for the day was about completed, Frankenfeld of the local weather bureau, dropped into the office and suggested the advisability of my starting for home, if I wanted to reach there ahead of a storm that was portended by falling barometer and darkening skies.

“Cyclone?” I asked.

“No, not so bad as that. We never have cyclones in cities, but I think it will be a nasty storm and I would advise you to hit the trail.”

I went to my home in the western suburbs and the storm burst with wicked fury as I entered the house. Old Moses, my black house servant, and I had a lively time closing the windows and when this was done I watched the storm wrench branches from trees and carry them over the tops of houses. I saw my chicken house topple over and the prize rosebushes I had nursed so tenderly torn up by the roots. Almost every growing thing in the garden was blown away. That was the penalty of living in the suburbs, I thought, as I viewed the damage, for the storm would pass over the built-up city and do no harm. I ate dinner and went to bed with a grouch.

I was always up at five in the morning and at my desk before seven, but the morning after the storm the street-car line I was accustomed to take wasn’t running. Nor had any morning papers been delivered. More penalty for living in the suburbs, more annoyances to start one off to business in bad humor. I found cars moving on another line four blocks away but I was half-way to my office before a man got on with a newspaper. When he opened it the headlines that caught my eyes gave me the greatest surprise I had ever known. Hundreds killed; thousands of homes in ruins! And I was grieving over uprooted rosebushes and a wrecked chicken house.

When I got to the office I saw a fine demonstration of the efficiency of our organization. Not a man was missing and all were as busy as hornets. Not one had slept a wink all night. My assistant, whose duty it was to stand watch for an emergency after the last edition had gone to press and I had left for the day, was at his desk with a few belated workers when the storm hit the city. Darkness came and then a screeching, roaring pandemonium. The tornado raged with unabated fury for nearly an hour. All through it telephones rang and reporters in various sections of the city described what they saw. Dead lying in the streets, homes demolished, havoc, ruin and desolation for miles.

An extra was rushed to press and the newsboys were crying it in the streets before the storm subsided. Additional details came over the telephones and a second extra was sent out, followed by another shortly before midnight. Throughout the remainder of the night the reporters groped about in the blackness, for almost the entire lighting system where the greatest damage was done had been put out of business, and they bravely helped the firemen and police drag out the maimed and dying from the heaps of ruined homes. With the beginning of dawn they were in the office, writing like mad of the dreadful scenes they had witnessed. I shall always be proud of those boys and of what they did while their boss was fuming over his uprooted rosebushes.

It was the first big story within my reach that I hadn’t mixed up with since I became a newspaper man, though I had another similar experience some years later when President McKinley was assassinated.

At the time of that tragic occurrence I was city editor of the _Evening World_ in New York. One afternoon I started for a ball game at the Polo Grounds, but the weather was so hot I gave up going to the game on the way uptown and went to my hotel at the entrance to Central Park and was soon fast asleep. When I awoke there were several notes that had been slipped under the door. I was wanted at the telephone booth in the hotel. In those days rooms were not supplied with individual telephones. I went to the office and learned that the _World_ had been calling for me. The operator rang for twenty minutes without getting a connection. “Busy,” “busy,” reported the exchange.

“Anything happened?” I asked the operator.

She shifted her gum and languidly drawled: “McKinley’s shot!”

Good lord, the President assassinated and I fast asleep! The Nation pulsating with horror and an editor sleeping his wits away because the day was warm! When I got the connection with my office they told me a third extra had gone to press. There was nothing left for me to do but eat dinner, smoke a cigar, read the papers and go to bed. And that is what I did.

While I was city editor of the _Post-Dispatch_ a judge of the criminal court challenged me from the bench to fight a duel. It was an amusing episode as I now recall it, although it might have terminated in a tragedy.

Colonel Charles H. Jones, a pompous little man with bristling white whiskers, had been sent from the _World_ office by Mr. Pulitzer to take editorial charge of the _Post-Dispatch_. He was an aggressive chap, with an exalted opinion of his importance, and he kept the paper and everyone connected with it in hot water almost from the day he assumed control. It was said of him that he used vitriol when writing editorials. He was volcanic and turgescent. One day he caused to be written an article attacking the integrity of the President of the Board of Education, which he personally passed upon and ordered to be printed the following day. He left for the East on a night train.

In his absence I was in charge of the paper and that is how I came to be arrested for criminal libel when the angry official instituted legal action against the newspaper. I was arraigned in the criminal court before Judge Murphy, who was smarting over an article about himself that had appeared in the _Post-Dispatch_ at a time I was away on vacation. Because the Judge was known to be hostile to the paper and everyone connected with it, the attorney who represented me asked that the libel case be transferred to another court.

It was then that Judge Murphy turned loose his wrath. Rising from the bench in a towering passion, he stalked out of the courtroom and disappeared in his chambers. The spectators suspected something unusual was about to happen and there was a hum of suppressed conversation while awaiting the Judge’s return. Larry Harrigan, Chief of Police, moved around to where I was sitting and whispered a warning in my ear.

“Be careful what you say and do,” he said. “Judge Murphy is crazy drunk and ugly. He will kill you if you give him a chance.”

My vicarious arrest was growing exciting. Judge Murphy returned from his chambers, flourishing a copy of the _Post-Dispatch_. It was the issue that had contained the article attacking him. His face was livid and there was a look in his eyes that evidently meant mischief. He ordered me to the witness stand and motioned to Chester Crum, a prominent lawyer, to interrogate me. The frame-up was now complete, for Crum had brought his ax to the grindstone along with Murphy. Crum’s grievance was a story in the _Post-Dispatch_ that had set the town laughing by describing how he slid down a fire escape when a gambling house was raided.

Judge Murphy handed the newspaper to Crum and leaned far over his bench and glared furiously at me. His right hand was beneath the bench and the Chief of Police afterward told me that it held a revolver. The courtroom was packed, the spectators silent and expectant.

Crum read the article about Murphy in a loud voice and at the end of each sentence I was asked who had written it. I declined to answer. When Crum had finished reading, Judge Murphy thunderously ejected a stump speech about his life being an open book, guiltless of what the paper had printed about him. He wound up his tirade by openly challenging me to fight him a duel. Then he went back to his chambers for another drink.

Chief Harrigan escorted me to my office. He told me that throughout the questioning by Crum, Judge Murphy was gripping a revolver, evidently intent on shooting me if he could find provocation. The Chief gave me his revolver and told me to carry it and not to hesitate to use it if Murphy attacked me.

The next edition of the _Post-Dispatch_ contained a stenographic report of what had taken place in the courtroom. It was headed: “A Blatherskite on the Bench.”

An hour after the paper came out Judge Murphy, drunk and ugly, appeared in the street opposite. A crowd gathered in anticipation of a shooting, but the judge contented himself with shaking his clenched fist at the editorial windows above and shouting nasty names. He didn’t come up or fire a shot. The affair had a bloodless termination. I was exonerated when the libel case was given a hearing before another judge and the case itself was thrown out of court.

A week later I was walking down Olive Street one Sunday morning and I saw Judge Murphy approaching from the opposite direction. There was no one else in sight. I would have avoided meeting him had there been any other way than to turn and run. I thrust my hand into the pocket of my overcoat and gripped Harrigan’s revolver. At the same time Judge Murphy’s hand shot into the breast of his coat. Neither of us slackened pace and we were soon so close that we could have touched each other. Judge Murphy averted his eyes from me and I was just as polite to him, though I am positive that both of us were cautiously squinting out of the corner of an eye. Nothing happened. He simply walked on as if I wasn’t there. I don’t think he so much as looked back after passing me. I did, for I was a bit apprehensive of rear attack, but both of us walked so fast we were soon out of range.

I recall another occasion when our fiery little editor, Colonel Jones, came very near being the cause of a tragedy. Some years before, while he was editing the St. Louis _Republic_, he and David R. Francis had been such fast friends that Jones persuaded Francis to run for Governor, supporting his candidacy with his newspaper and personally working for his election. Francis was elected. A quarrel between the wives of the two men disrupted their friendship. Mrs. Jones wasn’t invited to the inaugural festivities and of course her husband wouldn’t go without her. There followed a bitter attack on Francis in the editorial columns of the _Republic_ and it was kept up until Francis put an end to the sting of his tormentor by quietly purchasing control of the _Republic_ and ousting Colonel Jones from the editorial chair.

Jones went to the _World_ in New York for awhile and later was sent back to St. Louis by Mr. Pulitzer to take editorial charge of the _Post-Dispatch_. He arrived soon after I joined the staff of the _Post-Dispatch_ and his first official act was to appoint me city editor of the paper. The enmity between Jones and Francis had not cooled and Jones let no opportunity escape to give Francis a stab with his caustic pen. One day there was something printed in the paper in connection with the mysterious drowning of Dennis P. Slattery that so aroused the anger of Francis, he came stalking into the _Post-Dispatch_ office, accompanied by his brother Tom, angrily demanding to know where the editor was. I told him that Colonel Jones was in his office on the floor above and he and Tom Francis went up the staircase two steps at a time.

I saw my assistant, Kinney Underwood, another fiery little Southerner, grab a revolver from a drawer of his desk and rush up the stairway behind them. I followed. The two Francis brothers were in the editor’s sanctum, when I got there, demanding an immediate retraction.

Colonel Jones was at his desk, white of face but coldly dignified. I found Kinney Underwood in an adjoining office, that was divided from the editor’s sanctum by a glass partition through which every action of the men inside could be watched. Underwood was crouched behind a desk, revolver in hand, the weapon leveled at David R. Francis. The latter had his back turned to him. Francis never knew how close to death he was. One move to draw a weapon and Underwood would surely have killed him.

With that imperturbable dignity that characterized our spunky little editor, I heard him tell Francis to dictate to a stenographer what he wished to have printed by way of retraction and I saw him at least pretend to go ahead with his work while this was being done. When the stenographer had written it out Colonel Jones carefully read it and struck out more than half of it with his blue pencil. He handed the revised item back to Francis to read.

“I’ll print that much and no more,” calmly remarked the editor.

Francis read and gave a nod of approval.

Colonel Jones turned to Tom Francis. “Take your brother out of here,” he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of David R. and resuming the writing from which he had been interrupted. They went away.

That is how close David R. Francis came to never receiving an appointment as American ambassador to Russia.

Colonel Jones continued to lambast in the editorial columns everyone with whom he formed an enmity and drove all of the advertisers away from the newspaper by his vicious attacks. The property was in imminent peril of being wrecked and Mr. Pulitzer began proceedings in the courts to oust his editor, who tenaciously hung onto his job by virtue of a long-term contract. It cost Mr. Pulitzer a lot of money to get rid of him, but it was cheap at any price. A stroke of apoplexy terminated his editorial career and some years later he died in a sanatarium in Italy.

Then came the startling news that the Spaniards had sunk the _Maine_ off Havana. Alf. Ringling, the circus man, and I were discussing the probability of an early declaration of war at luncheon, and our conversation was interrupted by a messenger boy from my office. He brought a telegram from Mr. Pulitzer, directing me to leave for New York that night if possible and to come prepared to remain. A few hours later I sat in the end of an observation car and watched the twinkling lights of St. Louis fade into nothing. My newspaper career in that city was at an end and I was glad of it.