Chapter III: Chicago Tribune Days

I enjoyed my work on the Chicago _Tribune_. It was the life I had longed for from boyhood, and I became so fascinated with reporting that I regretted having wasted so much time as a barnstorming player. At first I was given only the smaller assignments to cover, but no matter how unimportant the city editor considered them they were always important to me and I seldom failed to make the most of my opportunities.

It wasn’t long until some of my small assignments began to develop into big stories, for one cannot always measure the value of a potential news tip from the restricted horizon of a city editor’s desk. I demonstrated this soon after I joined the staff. A citizen telephoned that rumors were circulating of some sort of trouble at the plant of a big steel corporation in a southern suburb. The city editor chased me out to investigate. He evidently didn’t think much of the tip, for several of his star reporters were sitting idle in the office at the time.

It was a long, hard trip through a nasty storm, but when I got back to the office I had the biggest news beat of the year. The sheriff had closed the plant, throwing hundreds of men out of work; the concern was bankrupt and the president of it had fled to Europe. He was a man of great business prominence, his wife a leader in high society. I saw him years afterward in New York, wrecked in health, his once brilliant mind shattered. He died in an insane asylum.

That was an astonished city editor when he lifted a bunch of copy from my desk and read what I had written about the collapse of the steel corporation. Through lack of experience I had neglected to tell him what I had. He was quickly alert to the importance of it and my first big news story filled a lot of space on the front page.

But it isn’t often that the experienced editor is caught napping. It is more apt to be the reporter. I recall that memorable night in the _Tribune_ office when a reporter who had been sent to interview William H. Vanderbilt strolled languidly into the office, and reported that the great railroad magnate refused to talk. His assignment had been an important one. The Nickel Plate road, paralleling the tracks of the Vanderbilt lines between Chicago and Buffalo, had just been completed and the financial pirates who conceived and carried to a finish what the public suspected was the biggest gold brick game ever attempted, were waiting for Vanderbilt to open his money-bags and pay their price. Mr. Vanderbilt had arrived that night in his private car and the reporter was sent to ask him what he was going to do about it. It was so late when he got back the city editor had gone home and his assistant, busy with belated copy, simply nodded as the reporter turned in a brief item and said he had failed to get an interview.

With this off his mind, the reporter strolled to the telegraph editor’s room, in search of a poker game. I was there, chatting with Tod Cowles, the night editor. It was almost time for the last edition to go to press.

We heard the reporter tell the poker players how he boarded the Vanderbilt car and asked its owner if he had come to buy the Nickel Plate and Vanderbilt had sneeringly called it a “streak of rust.” The reporter had insisted on getting an interview as a matter of “great public interest” and the irate old magnate had arrogantly exclaimed: “The public be damned.”

“The old devil actually pushed me out of the car and slammed the door in my face,” concluded the reporter, as he began to deal the cards.

I saw an angry glitter in the night editor’s eyes as he glanced at a proof containing a brief item of the railroad magnate’s arrival. He ordered the reporter to drop his cards and tell him every word said on the car. Then he got as busy as a boy killing rattlesnakes. The most striking story on the front page that morning was headed “The Public be Damned!” The expression spread all over the world and is still frequently quoted, nearly forty years afterward.

On that trip William H. Vanderbilt bought the “streak of rust,” and Calvin S. Brice, General Samuel H. Thomas, William B. Howard, Columbus R. Cummings, and the rest of the crowd, who put this over on him, divided the swag. The deal netted them more than $13,000,000.

I got the full particulars first-hand from Howard, a shrewd financier who was a genius for making fortunes in daring manipulations. He gave me the details of many big financial stories. My first trip to New York was as his guest, to write about the construction of the Croton aqueduct, which was then being dug. He had a $7,000,000 contract for the Tarrytown section. We stayed at the Union League Club for two weeks and I frequently lunched there with his financial associates, who amazed me with the freedom with which they discussed their affairs in my presence. My reportorial greed for news fairly made me itch to tell in print some of the things these mighty men discussed so brazenly. It was my introduction to the life of a millionaire. The taste for luxury I acquired in those two weeks I never got over.

One day, after luncheon, General Thomas confided to me that he had once been a reporter and he told me something of how he accumulated his millions. I suggested that he let me into the secret of how he did it.

“Better stick to reporting,” he said. “You’re a lot happier now than I am.” From what I learned afterwards I am inclined to think he meant it.

Some millionaires I have since known were far less happy and far more discontented than most reporters. One who is rated high among the greatest and most successful in the industrial world and is reputed to have accumulated more than $100,000,000, had to divorce his beautiful wife because of her infatuation for an aged gambler. His doctor added to his woes by cutting off his drinks and forbidding him to smoke. That was some blow to a man who always drank champagne with his breakfast and smoked a box of dollar cigars every day. The doctor also put him on a diet of plain food. Death was to be the penalty of disobedience. What a wretchedly unhappy man he must be, although he had enough money to ballast a battleship, a marble palace on Fifth Avenue, another at Newport, and a country estate that a king might envy.

Another mighty man of big finance was on such bad terms with his home folk they would scarcely speak to him. All the big guns in the Wall Street district feared him and some say he practically controlled the affairs of the nation, bossing Presidents and Cabinet officers and senators in much the same way that he did his chauffeur. But he got his one day when the wind slammed a door in his face, driving an amber and gold cigar holder so far down his throat that he almost choked to death. It must have strained something in his mechanism, for he had to go abroad for treatment. He died there, with only a granddaughter, a half dozen doctors and several trained nurses at his bedside. The newspapers got out extras announcing his death and all the millionaires in Wall Street got up and stretched, much as the fans do at the Polo Grounds at the end of the seventh.

But I have wandered far afield from the newsroom of a daily paper. When I began on the Chicago _Tribune_, Joseph Medill was the chief editor and principal owner. He was a man of big brains and wielded a mighty influence. He belonged to the old school of journalists. There were few like him then; I know of none now. He and Dana were much alike, only Mr. Medill was more influential in politics and took a more active interest in municipal government and public improvements. It was his great brain power that made the _Tribune_ the most prosperous of all newspapers west of New York, a position from which it has never receded, though it is no longer dominated by its editor. Few who read it now know or care who writes its editorials or directs the policy. It is just a big, well-greased machine and the wheels roll round and the paper comes out with accustomed regularity no matter who drops out from the organization. The indispensable man in a great newspaper office no longer exists.

In those days Mr. Medill was almost as well-known to most of the inhabitants of Chicago as Lake Michigan, yet he was seldom seen outside of his sanctum. Conversation with him was difficult, for he was so deaf that he couldn’t hear a word without holding an ever ready trumpet to his ear. He had a trick of turning his affliction to advantage, sometimes pretending not to hear when he did and withdrawing his trumpet from his ear and resuming his writing when he was bored or didn’t wish to listen.

I recall when he was on the witness stand in a half-million dollar libel suit and insisted on telling what he had to say in his own way. In vain the counsel for the plaintiff tried to stop him, but Mr. Medill pretended not to understand, haranguing the jury and presenting his side of the controversy in such scholarly and logical fashion that verdict was returned in his favor. Lawyer Trude, counsel for the _Tribune_, declared that the case would surely have gone against him but for the cleverness of the editor.

It was my good fortune to attract the attention of the great editor. He intrusted to me many assignments in which he was personally interested and I was never happier than when my efforts won his approval. He had a way of bestowing praise that stirred in the recipient an ambition to do even better, but he could also be snappish and make one feel cheap if an article did not come up to his expectation. Once he was so crabbed with me that I went back to my desk and exploded the indignation I felt in a letter of resignation. The next day he sent for me and related an anecdote about something that happened to him in the early part of his career and I laughed so heartily that I forgot my injured dignity, for what he told me made him out a bigger boob than I had been.

His brother Sam was managing editor, but I came into contact with him very little, for he was in poor health and not long after I went on the paper he went to California with his close personal friend William H. Crane, the comedian, and soon after his return he died. We all mourned him, for he was popular with the entire staff, but the paper came out as regularly as when he was alive and there stepped into his managerial shoes a son-in-law of Joseph Medill, Robert W. Patterson, known among his intimates as “Handsome Bob.”

Most of the staff looked upon his coming as a huge joke. They called him a dude and prophesied that he wouldn’t last six months. He had been given the job simply because he had married the editor’s daughter, they sneered, and they poked fun at his faultless attire and criticized his whiskers, which he parted in the middle and brushed with much care. But one cannot always tell by the way a man grows his whiskers what sort of brain power is concealed beneath his skull. Nor does it infallibly follow that a man is a fool because he is married to the daughter of his boss. He had barely got his editorial chair warm before the _Tribune_ began to do things, bigger and better than ever before. The staid old way of presenting news gave way to a newer and better way and the _Tribune_, by brilliant strokes of enterprise, made such rapid progress that some of its contemporaries couldn’t keep the pace and dropped out of the race. It was Mr. Medill’s great brains that founded the _Tribune_ and placed it on a solid foundation but it was Mr. Patterson’s news instinct and managerial ability that lifted the paper out of the rut.

Some of the old hacks on the staff described the new managing editor as an “arrogant up-start,” but I always found him courteous and kindly, quick to appreciate efficient work, and equally quick to condemn the slovenly methods and slothful ways of some of the old-timers who comprised the hammer brigade.

I am told that after the death of Mr. Medill, Mr. Patterson began to let down and throw the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of subordinates while he was pulling wires to get elected United States senator. He erected one of the costliest mansions in Washington and lived there much of the time during the later years of his life, but he never attained his political ambition. He suddenly dropped dead while on a visit to Philadelphia and the _Tribune_ is just as progressive and prosperous as it ever was. The paper is now controlled by the two grandsons of Mr. Medill. One of them was in the Ojai Valley in Southern California when I was, a few years ago. He startled the natives by chartering a stagecoach, drawn by six white horses, to convey him fifty miles over the mountains to Santa Barbara to get his hair cut.

The man on the paper who most interested me was the city editor. He was one of the oddest characters I ever came in contact with and one of the best-informed men on almost every conceivable subject. Eccentric though he was, he was a marvelous developer of young men. He had a positive talent for exciting their ambition and training them to make the most of their opportunities. A demon for hard work and a slave to his profession, he was intolerant toward shirkers. Some called him a “slave driver,” but he never asked one of his men to work nearly so hard as he did himself. He was always the first to show up in the morning and he was almost the last to leave at night. The office clock was less regular than he and from the time he got to the office until the paper went to press he was never idle. He did more actual work every day than a half-dozen men now perform in most newspaper offices. For twenty-seven years he worked sixteen hours a day and seven days a week without a day off and without once taking a vacation. At the end of twenty-seven years’ continual service, Mr. Medill insisted on his having a vacation.

Once before when a holiday had been suggested, the city editor had angrily threatened to resign. This time he yielded to persuasion. He bought a fishing rod and what goes with it and sat for a week on a bridge that crosses the Chicago River, baiting his hook with worms and casting it into the turbid waters of that vast sewer. He sat there from sunup till sundown for a week. He didn’t get so much as a nibble but at the end of his vacation he returned to his desk sunburned and happy.

Fred Hall was his name. He served throughout the Civil War in the War Department as secretary to Mr. Stanton and, after the rumpus between Stanton and President Johnson, came to Chicago and got a job on the _Tribune_. I don’t think he has been beyond the city limits since. When I last heard of him he had been retired on a pension, after almost a half-century in the _Tribune_ office. His wife had been horribly killed in a motor boat explosion, his only daughter had married and moved away and he was alone with his books and his memories. I know but one man more lonely than he is. Both of us have lived too long.

In fancy I can see him as he was in the old days when I was a _Tribune_ reporter, crouched in a chair, sucking the stem of a corncob pipe and filling the air about him with a dense cloud of smoke while his active brain created striking features for the next day’s issue, sometimes tossing into the wastebasket the poorly written story of some indolent reporter and rewriting it in his own finished style. He was the first man I ever saw use a typewriter in the editorial room and his nimble fingers did jigsteps on the keys as he reeled off columns of copy. In the office he invariably wore a straw hat, summer or winter, a hat so yellowed with age that one might suspect he wore it when he came from Washington at the close of the war. His office coat was a seedy cardigan jacket, so frayed and worn that his shirt sleeves showed through the elbows. I never knew him to wear a different suit than the one he had on when first I saw him. His beard was scraggly and of many shades. Sometimes his blue eyes would beam with merriment through the spectacles he always wore and sometimes they stared at one icily when a reporter stammeringly attempted to explain how he happened to fall down on his assignment. It was useless to defend failure with deception, for he seemed to know instinctively that a lie was coming before it was formed. I sometimes felt as if he could simply look a man in the eye and read what was in his mind.

He kept himself aloof from everyone except his family and the members of his staff, yet he had an intimate knowledge of nearly every important person in Chicago. And he knew their secrets, who and when they married and how they got their money. He knew the city better than all the police force and the letter carriers combined. He knew just how long it would ordinarily take a reporter to get to any part of it, cover a story and get back to the office. He could rattle off names and dates from memory of nearly every event that had taken place since the “Big Fire,” and he was a human encyclopedia of a wider range of subjects than I ever dreamed could be stored in one human brain.

How he acquired so much useful information always puzzled me. He read nothing but newspapers in the office, for his time was too much occupied to permit him to read books and he was never in his home except to eat and sleep. He had no companions and never went anywhere. He never went to a theater, but he could repeat the plot of every new play and tell who the actors were and the parts they played. The next day after the first performance of _Mikado_ he was humming “The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la.”

Some of the men who were reporters with me at that time afterward became famous in literature, in other professions, and some overturned tradition by winning high places in finance. Frank Vanderlip is the most illustrious success of all. While reporting the financial market for the _Tribune_ he won the confidence of Lyman Gage and when the latter retired from a bank presidency to become Secretary of the Treasury, he appointed Vanderlip his chief assistant and Vanderlip stepped from there into the National City Bank, where he soon rose to President and then to Chairman of the Board of Directors, recently retiring with more millions than a barn would hold.

John Wilkie was also taken from the _Tribune_ by Mr. Gage to fill the important position of Chief of the Secret Service, holding the job with distinction through several administrations and finally giving it up to become general manager of the Chicago street railways. John McGovern and Stanley Waterloo both achieved reputations as writers of fiction. Ted McPhelim, described by Sir Henry Irving in his memoirs, as the greatest of American dramatic critics, read and studied and wrote until he broke down completely. He was one of the gentlest and most lovable of all my many brilliant associates and didn’t deserve the dreadful fate that befell him. He was yet a young man when he died in an asylum. Paul Potter, the most humorous writer on the staff, became famous as a writer of plays. He still is.

Will Van Benthuysen, who joined the staff about the time I did, succeeded Mr. Patterson as managing editor when Mr. Medill died, attracted the attention of Mr. Pulitzer and was lured to New York as managing editor of the morning _World_ at double the salary he was getting in Chicago. George Bell, who came over from Ireland in the steerage and wrote such a clever description of his voyage that he was promptly hired as a reporter on the _Tribune_, became one of our shining stars. He also felt the call of the Metropolis and was many years with the _Sun_. Like Ted McPhelim, he died insane. Vance Thompson, one of our brightest reporters, later distinguished himself as a Paris correspondent and fattened his bank account by writing one of the “best sellers,” _Eat and Grow Thin_. There was “Biff” Hall, who became a magistrate; Charlie Shuman, who got rich building apartment houses in Los Angeles; Burke Waterloo, whom everyone loved and who mystified all of us by blowing out his brains.