Chapter I: From the Bottom

I began life, and I ended life--the real living of the everyday world--as a newspaper man.

Newspapering, of a kind, commenced for me in a thriving little Western town when I was just fourteen years old, and had started out to climb from the bottom the long ladder that leads up through education and experience to fame and fortune. In this little town I was attracted by a sign in the window of a newspaper office. A boy was wanted to deliver papers.

I applied at the front counter for the job and was directed to the circulation manager, who critically sized me up and declared that I wouldn’t do. He needed strong boys, he said, boys who were husky enough to pack a heavy bundle of newspapers over a route several miles in length and deliver them to subscribers before they sat down to breakfast.

I was a little chap, even for my age, but I had grit and persuaded the man to give me a trial. It was my duty to be in the pressroom at 3.30 o’clock every morning, take papers from the press as fast as they were printed, fold to regulation form, and start off with several hundred strapped to my shoulder, delivering to the homes of subscribers as I went along. It was a five-mile tramp before breakfast and in almost the hilliest town I ever saw. Many of the streets on my route were so steep that one took almost as many steps upward as forward and in the winter months I would often flounder through snow that was waist deep.

My wages were four dollars a week. I realized that I could not pay expenses and save up for my education on this slender income, so I set to work to find ways of increasing it. Opportunity came knocking at my door within a week. In the same building with the newspaper was a telegraph office and one morning when I returned from delivering papers the operator called me in and asked if I would carry an important message to the home of a United States Senator. It was from President Grant, he said, and could not be delayed. His regular messenger boy hadn’t shown up.

I readily consented and I recall how chesty I felt as bearer of a Presidential message on which the fate of the nation might hang. My importance grew on me as I trudged along and finally I broke into a run. When the maid came to the door and said the Senator wasn’t up I insisted that she show me to his bedchamber.

I was led upstairs to where the Senator was sleeping his wits away, perhaps dreaming of that big land swindle with which his name was afterward so scandalously linked. I rapped several times without a response. The door was ajar and I could get a glimpse of him in his bed, the blankets pulled over his head as if to deaden the sound of his noisy snoring.

Getting no reply to my repeated knocking I pushed the door open, went boldly into the room, and yanked the bedclothing from the sleeper. He awoke with a start and glared at me as if he were going to bite.

“Wake up, Senator,” I exclaimed, not a bit abashed, “I have an important telegraph message for you from President Grant.” I know that I must have swelled up as I thrust it into his outstretched hand.

He read it and began to laugh.

“How did you know that it is important?” he asked.

“Any message from President Grant to a United States Senator must be important,” I replied. The Senator patted my head as he reached for his trousers, drew out a silver dollar, and handed it to me.

“Nothing to collect on the message,” I hastened to assure him.

“The dollar is yours for being my little alarm clock and waking me up,” he good-naturedly replied.

He asked me to pull the bellcord and when a servant responded he ordered that breakfast be brought up for both of us. And when it came he made me sit down and help him eat it.

During the breakfast he asked me a lot of questions about myself and my ambitions and he gave me some wholesome advice and loaned me two books from his library. He told me stories about famous statesmen and how some of them had begun life as I was beginning and had fought their way to the top. It was a wonderful hour I spent with him and there were other hours and more silver dollars and the loan of many volumes from his well-stocked bookcases in the weeks that followed before he was called back to Washington by the opening of Congress.

When I reported back to the telegraph office I was offered a steady job, the operator having discovered that his red-headed messenger had run off with a patent medicine vendor. The messenger work wouldn’t interfere with my delivering papers. I was to get thirteen dollars a month and “perquisites.” The big sounding word meant that I was permitted to charge an extra quarter for every telegram I delivered more than a mile from the office. Visions of affluence and the means of obtaining the much coveted education flashed through the dreams of a tired small boy that night.

Before falling asleep I figured up how much my earnings might amount to in a year and was elated with the total I set down. Delivering papers at four dollars a week and telegraph messages at thirteen dollars a month footed up three hundred and sixty-four dollars a year, not counting “perquisites.” The “perquisites” was the only uncertain element in my calculations. I knew that a large percentage of the population lived more than a mile from the office and I tried to make mental estimates of how many might be important enough to receive telegrams. I grew as optimistic over my prospect as the visionary Colonel Sellers did in his calculations of how many bottles of lotion would be needed to cure all the sore eyed persons in the world.

The next day opportunity came knocking again. Across the way from “our office” was an unpretentious restaurant, run by a jolly, red faced man with an enormous nose, and his adorable wife. It was cheap as to price, but everything was of good quality. It was the cleanest and neatest eating place I can recall. At least that is the impression that lingers in my memory after the elapse of almost half a century. I wasn’t so fastidious as regards restaurants and food then as I grew to be in later years. How I did love that dear motherly woman who hurried steaming hot coffee and a “stack of wheats” to me every morning when I returned from delivering papers.

One morning she began chatting with me in a friendly way and when she had coaxed me to tell about myself she proposed that I help them out by acting as cashier during the mid-day rush hour. In return I was to get my meals. It took me less than a minute to accept. It meant that I could save my earnings, for I also had free lodgings, the foreman of the pressroom having granted me permission to sleep on a stack of print paper. I acquired a bedquilt and at night I would roll up in it and sleep more soundly and untroubled than ever I did in the luxurious Plaza Hotel in New York, where, later in life, I made my home for many years. There are tender memories of my nest a-top the reserve supply of print paper, covered only with my quilt of many colors and fantastic design. It was there I learned the lesson of self-education; a lesson that was worth while.

Looking backward now from the last milestone of my life’s journey, I am wondering what I might have achieved if I could have had the opportunities so many young men neglect.

There was an editor who took a liking to me and who helped me in a lot of ways. I have often wondered how so busy a man could have the time or patience to give so much attention to so small a human atom as me. He selected books for me to read and he would talk to me about them and explain many of the perplexities that lodged in my mind. I had a duplicate key to his bookcases and was permitted to take a book whenever I wished. In return for this privilege I kept the bookcases in order. It was a fine opportunity for a chap who was hungry for knowledge and had no other way of acquiring it. And how I did read! There was nothing in the wide range of literature that I wouldn’t tackle and try to comprehend. I read all of the essays of Emerson and Carlyle, the philosophies of Aristotle, Epictetus, Montaigne, and Johnson and volume after volume of history, ancient, modern, and medieval. In the line of fiction I read all of Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, and a score of others of the great authors. I read the lives of the great men of all times.

And, best of all, I read the Bible. Of all authors, of all times, there were none who expressed themselves so clearly and so beautifully as did the men who wrote this greatest Book of all literature.

I studied the sciences, especially astronomy, chemistry, geology, and ethnology. The works of Voltaire and Darwin interested but mystified me. I read and studied and analyzed so far as my undeveloped brain would reach, but in all my reading of such books my belief in God and in the teachings of Christ was never shaken. To-day, in spite of my present condition and what brought me to it, that belief is as firmly rooted as ever.

I learned other things in the newspaper office and in the telegraph office that were useful later on. The easiest accomplishment that came to me was when I mastered the Morse code and learned to send and receive telegraph messages. The operator who employed me as messenger boy was my instructor and I repaid him by often taking messages from the wires while he lingered with convivial companions in a nearby saloon. One night the newspaper editor was worried because it was nearly time for the night report of the Associated Press to begin and the telegraph operator couldn’t be found. Scouts were sent scurrying in every direction, to search for him. When they found him and brought him to the office he could scarcely stand on his feet.

The signal for clearing the wire had already been given and the operator lurched over to the table and responded to the call of his office. The press report began coming. I knew the operator was in no condition for duty and I watched him with nervous apprehension. Automatically he grabbed a pencil and began to write but he got down only a few illegible sentences when he collapsed and plunged from his seat to the floor.

I let him lie there in drunken stupor while I took every word of the report without once breaking in on the wire to ask that a sentence be repeated. The report was several thousand words in length. The editor, tense and anxious, sat by my side, editing the copy as fast as I wrote it, sending it direct to the composing room. When it was done I almost went to pieces from the nervous strain.

The editor told everyone in the office how I had saved the paper from being sent to press without a line of telegraph news and before I went to bed I got him to promise not to report the operator. I met the operator many years later. He had become chief operator in one of the most important telegraph offices in the West and gave me every facility at his disposal when I called to arrange for filing my report of a great political convention. He told me then that he never drank another drop of liquor after that night I saved him from disgrace.

At the time I mastered telegraphy I also learned to set type. And I learned something of what is called job work, such as setting display type for letter heads, business cards, circulars, and other commercial necessities of the printer’s art. I learned to lock a form and put it on a press, and to run and feed the press. I got no pay for what I did other than what I earned by delivering papers and telegraph messages. I did it because I loved it and cared for no other form of enjoyment. I had no boy friends and made no attempt to cultivate them. My associates were men, chiefly men from whom I could learn something useful and there wasn’t a man in the entire organization of the newspaper office who didn’t cheerfully explain to me anything I asked of him. Even the busy editors and printers would stop important work to help me with something I couldn’t comprehend. Perhaps that is why I have always tried to be helpful to boys who were beginning at the bottom of the ladder as I did.

At the time I was trying to educate myself from books borrowed from the editor’s library, I chanced to get a copy of a weekly story paper that was exclusively for boys and girls. With that issue there had been started a department for instruction in shorthand, conducted by one of the ablest stenographers in New York. Shorthand was then almost unknown in the West and even in the big cities the comparatively few who had mastered it were employed in court and legislative work. It was but little known even in big business, which hadn’t yet heard of the telephone, or of electric lights, or typewriting and adding machines. I became interested, sent on my subscription to the magazine and studied the lessons. Soon I purchased a set of textbooks and applied myself with such industry that I quickly mastered it. I got so that I could take down in shorthand messages that came over the telegraph wires. Evenings I would attend lectures and public meetings and constant practice soon made it possible for me to make verbatim reports of even the most rapid speakers.

One day a lawyer came to me and asked if I could report an important trial in which he was to appear as counsel. I was timid about undertaking it, but urged on by the telegraph operator and my friend the editor, I consented. The day of the trial came and I walked importantly into the courtroom with my notebooks and pencils. The lawyer who had employed me greeted me effusively and escorted me to a table inside the railing and immediately under the judge’s bench. There had never been a stenographic report of a trial in that court.

Before the trial began the lawyer made a pretty speech about me, telling how I had mastered the mysteries of a wonderful sign language that enabled me to take down every word as fast as it was uttered, no matter how rapidly the speaker might talk. There were few stenographers who were my equals for speed and accuracy, the lawyer lyingly proclaimed. The courtroom was crowded and I felt as if a spotlight had been suddenly turned on me. The whitehaired judge beamed benignantly as he consented to my official appointment to report the trial.

There was one in the courtroom who was hostile. I knew it the instant I spotted him, scowling crossly at me from the opposite side of the table. He was a weazened old chap, as bald as an egg, hooked nose and catlike eyes. He had been official court reporter for many years and wrote longhand with considerable speed. He evidently looked upon me as menacing his job. Ignoring my appointment, he got out a ream of legal cap and proceeded to take testimony in accustomed longhand.

As many of the witnesses were foreigners and spoke brokenly I experienced some difficulty in understanding them, but I felt that I was getting along smoothly until the judge directed me to read the reply a witness had made to the preceding question. I read aloud from my notes and suddenly came to a halt. I stammered and stuttered. My notes had become undecipherable. The shorthand characters were dancing a jib. I could make nothing of them. The lawyer who employed me glared angrily and the old fiend with the hook nose sneered contemptuously.

The judge alone was sympathetic. He evidently understood that my confusion was due to nervousness rather than to incompetence. The judge tried to encourage me by telling me not to get flustered and to take as much time as necessary for the translation. The more I tried the more hopelessly confused I grew. At last the judge motioned to old hooknose to read from his report. How my heart throbbed the humiliation I felt when that hateful old court reporter gave me a withering look of contempt as he rose and read from his notes in a loud, firm voice. I have always hated him and his mean, supercilious sneer with which he sank contentedly back in his chair and gloated over my defeat. What stung the hardest was that almost the instant the judge signaled to old hooknose, the tantalizing hieroglyphics over which I had stumbled suddenly came to life and became as translatable as ordinary print. But it was too late. I felt crushed and beaten.

In the telegraph office one evening, I scribbled a fanciful story which I called _An Autobiography of a Hotel Office Chair._ I left it on a desk when I went across the street to eat and couldn’t find it when I returned. The operator had begun taking the press report and I couldn’t bother him. I thought he might have chucked it into the wastebasket, so went to bed, but when I returned from delivering papers the next morning I found a note from the editor, complimenting me on what he graciously described as an “exceedingly well-written little sketch.” He added: “Stick to it and you’ll get there.” Two silver dollars were enclosed.

I was transported to the seventh heaven with delight when I found that he had put my _Autobiography of a Hotel Office Chair_ in a conspicuous position on the editorial page. Within an hour I read it not less than a dozen times. Never were telegraph messages delivered with greater celerity than I delivered them that day. I felt as if I had wings.

When the operator got to the office he explained the mystery of how my story got into print. He had noticed it lying on the desk when I went to supper and had picked it up and read it. He took it to the editor. “I’ll print it,” the editor said. “That lad has got stuff in him. He’ll make a newspaper man some day.”

He double leaded my story and put it on the same page with his own brilliant editorials, for he was a brilliant writer, as I recall him, much too big a man for the job he occupied or the narrow sphere in which some unexplainable freak of fate had cast him. I was an editor in Chicago when I read of his tragic death. He was dropped to make room for a younger man and he went into the woods and blew out his wonderful brains.

A few more words of conceit about my story of the hotel office chair. A few days after it was printed the editor showed me the Chicago _Tribune_ and the St. Louis _Globe Democrat_. Each had reprinted my story, with credit to the paper in which it first appeared. Nothing I ever did afterwards in the field of journalism brought me so much happiness.

I began studying the papers of the big cities. Often I would read descriptions of events, get the facts in my mind, and rewrite them in my own way, critically comparing what I had written with what had been printed. I think this helped as much as anything in laying the foundation for what I ultimately came to. Whenever I could I talked to my friend, the editor, about my ambition and he was my ever-willing tutor and guide. One day he called me to him and said that before the year was up he would give me a regular job as reporter. I was elated over the promise and during the ensuing months I studied harder than ever.

Then came a calamity in my young life. Whether it was because I worked too much and slept too little, or because I was sleeping in the foul atmosphere of a basement pressroom, I was stricken with a fever and when next I was able to sit up I was a miserable little skeleton of skin and bones.

All ambition was gone. Even that bright and happy dream of a newspaper career vanished with the delirium I had suffered. There was but one thing in all the world I wanted. I wanted to see my mother. And home to her I went, as fast as a train could take me.