Chapter XVI: “sun” Reporters and Their Work (2)

The dead may live. St. Pierre is not alive, and never will
be. Out of shape has come a void. It is the apotheosis of
annihilation. To one who sits amid the ruins and gazes the
long miles upward over the seamed sides of La Pelée, still
thundering her terrible wrath, may come some conception of the
future ruin of the worlds.

It has been a day of sharp impressions, one cutting into
another until the memory-pad of the mind is crossed and
crisscrossed like the fissured flanks of La Pelée herself;
but most deeply graven of all, paradoxically, is the memory
of a dimness, a nothingness, an emptiness, a lack of
everything--the gray barrenness unrelieved of what was the
rainbow St. Pierre. Mont Pelée, the most awful evidence of
natural force to be seen in the world to-day--La Pelée,
majestic, terrible, overpowering, has been in evidence from
starlight to starlight, but it is the ashen blank that was once
the city of the Saint of the Rock that stands out most clearly
in the kaleidoscopic maze slipping backward and forward before
our eyes.

And thus on, without losing interest, for seven solid columns.

Will Irwin’s great page story, printed beside the straight news of the San Francisco earthquake, is another _Sun_ classic. Irwin had the fortune to be familiar with San Francisco, and he was able, without reference to book or map, to give to New York, through the _Sun_, a most vivid picture of “The City That Was.” It is a literary companion-piece of Thomas M. Dieuaide’s gray drawing of St. Pierre, but only the introduction must do here:

The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest-hearted,
most pleasure-loving city of this continent, and in many ways
the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of huddled
refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will;
but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate,
and have caught its flavor of the “Arabian Nights” feel that it
can never be the same.

It is as though a pretty, frivolous woman had passed through a
great tragedy. She survives, but she is sobered and different.
If it rises out of the ashes it must be a modern city, much
like other cities and without its old flavor.

There were less than five columns of the article, but it told the whole story of San Francisco; not in dry figures of commerce and paved streets, but of the people and places that every Eastern man had longed to see, but now never could see.

Writers like Ralph and Chamberlin, Dieuaide and Irwin, are spoken of as “star” reporters, yet the saying that the _Sun_ has no star men is not entirely fictional. Its best reporters are, and will be, remembered as stars, but no men were, or are, treated as stars. Big reporters cover little stories and cubs write big ones--if they can. A city editor does not send an inexperienced man on an assignment that requires all the skill of the trained reporter, yet it is _Sun_ history that many new men have turned in big stories from assignments that appeared, at first blush, to be inconsequential. There are always two or three so-called star men in the office, but the days when there are two or three star assignments are comparatively few.

Let us take, arbitrarily, one day twenty-five years ago--February 1, 1893--and see what some of the _Sun_ reporters did:

Jefferson Market Court S. H. Adams
Essex Market Court and Meeting of Irish
Federalists Rudolph E. Block
With R. Croker at Lakewood George B. Mallon
Custom-House News E. G. Riggs
City Hall News W. H. Olmsted
Police Headquarters Robert S. Yard
Ship News S. A. Wood
Coroners and Post-Office W. A. Willis
Subway Project and Murder at East
Eighty-Eighth Street W. J. Chamberlin
Magic Shell Swindle E. W. Townsend
Condition of Police Lodging-Houses D. G. Phillips
Carlyle Harris Case F. F. Coleman
Fire at Koster & Bial’s John Kenny
Bishop McDonnell’s Trip to Rome Evans

To gain an impression of the variety of work which comes to a _Sun_ reporter, take the assignments given to David Graham Phillips in the last days of his service with the _Sun_ in 1893:

March 1--Joseph Jefferson’s Lecture on the Drama
” 2--Bear Hunt at Glen Cove
” 3--Special Stories for the Sunday _Sun_
” 6--Obituary of W. P. Demarest
” 7--Meeting of Russian-Americans
” 8--Mystery at New Brunswick, New Jersey
” 9--Special Stories for Sunday
” 10--Accident in Seventy-First St. Tunnel
” 11--More Triplets in Cold Spring
” 12--Services in Old Scotch Church
” 13--Furniture Sale
” 14--Opening of Hotel Waldorf
” 15--Married Four Days, Then False
” 17--Dinner, Friendly Sons of St. Patrick
” 18--Parade and Show, Barnum & Bailey
” 19--Church Quarrel, Rutherford, N. J.

Phillips was then one of the _Sun’s_ best reporters; not as large a figure in the office as Ralph, or Chamberlin, or Spears, but one entitled to assignments of the first class. A list of his assignments soon after he joined the staff in the summer of 1890 would be monotonous--Jefferson Market police-court day after day; the kind of work with which the _Sun_ broke in a new man. Once on space, with eight dollars a column instead of fifteen dollars a week, Phillips got what he wanted--a peep at every corner of city life. In a little more than two years as a space man he picked up much of the material that is seen in his novels.

A _Sun_ man takes what comes to his lot. When W. J. Chamberlin returned from Cuba, his first assignment was a small police case. But a really good reporter finds his opportunity and his “big” stories for himself.

It would take a small book to give a list of the “big” stories that the _Sun_ has printed, and a five-foot shelf of tall volumes to reprint them all. Some of them were written leisurely, like Spears’s stories of the Bad Lands, some in comparative ease, like Ralph’s stories of Presidential inaugurations and the Grant funeral, or W. J. Chamberlin’s eleven-column report of the Dewey parade in 1899. In these latter the ease is only comparative, for the writer’s fingers had no time to rest in the achievement of such gigantic tasks. And the comparison is with the work done by reporters on occasions when there was no time to arrange ideas and choose words; when the facts came in what would be to the layman hopeless disorder.

Such an occasion, for instance, was the burning of the excursion steamer General Slocum, the description of which--in the end a marvellous tale of horror--was taken page by page from Lindsay Denison as his typewriter milled it out. Such an occasion was Edwin C. Hill’s opportunity to write his notable leads to the stories of the Republic wreck in 1909 and the Titanic disaster in 1912. But the _Sun_ and _Sun_ men never have hysterics. Tragedy seems to tighten them up more than other newspapers and newspapermen.

Introductions to big stories tell the pulse of the paper. Read, for example, the _Sun_ introduction to the great ocean tragedy of 1898:

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, July 6--The steamship La Bourgogne of
the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, which left New York
on Saturday last bound for Havre, was sunk at five o’clock
on Monday morning after a collision with the British ship
Cromartyshire in a dense fog about sixty miles south of Sable
Island. The ship had 750 persons aboard. The number of first
and second cabin passengers was 220 and of the steerage
passengers 297, a total of 517. The number of officers was 11,
of the crew 222. Eleven second-cabin and 51 steerage passengers
and 104 of the crew, a total of 166, were saved. All the
officers but four, all the first-cabin passengers, and all but
one of the more than one hundred women on board, were lost. The
number of lost is believed to be 584.

This was more detailed, but not more calm than the opening of Edwin C. Hill’s story on the loss of the Titanic:

The greatest marine disaster in the history of ocean traffic
occurred last Sunday night, when the Titanic of the White
Star Line, the greatest steamship that ever sailed the sea,
shattered herself against an iceberg and sank with, it is
feared, fifteen hundred of her passengers and crew in less
than four hours. The monstrous modern ships may defy wind and
weather, but ice and fog remain unconquered.

Out of nearly twenty-four hundred people that the Titanic
carried, only eight hundred and sixty-six are known to have
been saved, and most of these were women and children.

Probably the most restrained lead on a _Sun_ account of a great disaster was the introduction to the article on the Brooklyn Theatre fire of 1876:

The Brooklyn Theatre was built in September, 1871, opened for
public entertainment October 2, 1871, and burned to the ground
with the sacrifice of three hundred lives on the night of
Tuesday, December 5, 1876.

Of a more literary character, yet void of excitement, was the way Julian Ralph began his narrative of the blizzard of March, 1888:

It was as if New York had been a burning candle upon which
nature had clapped a snuffer, leaving nothing of the city’s
activities but a struggling ember.

While on this subject, it is as well to say that the _Sun_, in ordinary stories, does without introductions. “Begin at the beginning” has been one of its unwritten rules; or, as a veteran copy-reader remarked to a new reporter who told it all in the first paragraph:

“For the love of Mike, can’t you leave something for the head-writer to say?”

Every young newspaper man hears a good deal about “human-interest stories.” Some of the professors of journalism tell their pupils what human-interest stories are; others advise the best way to know one, or to get one. It is not evident, however, that any one has devised an infallible formula for taking a trivial or commonplace event and, by reason of the humour, pathos, or liveliness thereof, lifting it to a higher plane.

Amos Cummings is believed to have been the first newspaperman to see the news value of the lost child or the steer loose in the street. Amos himself wrote a story about the steer. Ralph wrote another one, and got his first job in New York on the strength of it. Frank W. O’Malley wrote one recently, and made New York laugh over it. But your newspaperman needs something besides a frightened steer and some streets; he must have “something in his noddle,” as Mr. Dana used to say.

Every reporter gets a chance to write a story about a lost child, but there are perhaps only two lost-child stories of the last thirty years that are remembered, and both were _Sun_ stories. David Graham Phillips found his lost child in the Catskills and wrote an article over which women wept. The next time a child was lost, Phillips’s city editor sent him on the assignment, and he fell down. The child was there, and the woods, and the bloodhounds, but the reporter’s brain would not turn backward and go again through the processes that made a great story. Hill’s story, which is remembered by its head--“A Little Child in the Dark”--will never be repeated--by Hill.

The tear-impelling article is the most difficult thing for a good reporter to write or a bad reporter to avoid trying to write. It might be added that good reporters write a “sob story” only when it fastens itself on them and demands to be written; and then they write the facts and let the reader do the weeping. O’Malley’s story of the killing of Policeman Gene Sheehan, which has been reprinted from the _Sun_ by several text-books for students of journalism, is good proof of this. Practically all of it--and it was a column long--was a straightforward report of the story told by the policeman’s mother. This is a part:

Mrs. Catherine Sheehan stood in the darkened parlor of her
home at 361 West Fifteenth Street late yesterday afternoon and
told her version of the murder of her son Gene, the youthful
policeman whom a thug named Billy Morley shot in the forehead
down under the Chatham Square elevated station early yesterday
morning. Gene’s mother was thankful that her boy hadn’t killed
Billy Morley before he died, “because,” she said, “I can say
honestly, even now, that I’d rather have Gene’s dead body
brought home to me, as it will be to-night, than to have him
come to me and say, ‘Mother, I had to kill a man this morning.’

“God comfort the poor wretch that killed the boy,” the mother
went on, “because he is more unhappy to-night than we are here.
Maybe he was weak-minded through drink. He couldn’t have known
Gene, or he wouldn’t have killed him. Did they tell you at the
Oak Street Station that the other policemen called Gene ‘Happy
Sheehan’? Anything they told you about him is true, because
no one would lie about him. He was always happy, and he was a
fine-looking young man. He always had to duck his helmet when
he walked under the gas-fixture in the hall as he went out the
door.

“After he went down the street yesterday I found a little book
on a chair--a little list of the streets or something that Gene
had forgot. I knew how particular they are about such things,
and I didn’t want the boy to get in trouble, so I threw on a
shawl and walked over through Chambers Street toward the river
to find him. He was standing on a corner some place down there
near the bridge, clapping time with his hands for a little
newsy that was dancing; but he stopped clapping--struck, Gene
did, when he saw me. He laughed when I handed him a little book
and told him that was why I’d searched for him, patting me on
the shoulder when he laughed--patting me on the shoulder.

“‘It’s a bad place for you here, Gene,’ I said. ‘Then it must
be bad for you, too, mammy,’ said he; and as he walked to the
end of his beat with me--it was dark then--he said, ‘There are
lots of crooks here, mother, and they know and hate me, and
they’re afraid of me’--proud, he said it--‘but maybe they’ll
get me some night.’

“He patted me on the back and turned and walked east toward his
death. Wasn’t it strange that Gene said that?

“You know how he was killed, of course, and how--now let me
talk about it, children, if I want to. I promised you, didn’t
I, that I wouldn’t cry any more or carry on? Well, it was five
o’clock this morning when a boy rang the bell here at the
house, and I looked out the window and said:

“‘Is Gene dead?’

“‘No, ma’am,’ answered the lad; ‘but they told me to tell you
he was hurt in a fire and is in the hospital.’

“Jerry, my other boy, had opened the door for the lad, and
was talking to him while I dressed a bit. And then I walked
down-stairs and saw Jerry standing silent under the gaslight;
and I said again, ‘Jerry, is Gene dead?’ And he said ‘Yes,’ and
he went out.

“After a while I went down to the Oak Street Station myself,
because I couldn’t wait for Jerry to come back. The policemen
all stopped talking when I came in, and then one of them told
me it was against the rules to show me Gene at that time; but I
knew the policeman only thought I’d break down. I promised him
I wouldn’t carry on, and he took me into a room to let me see
Gene. It was Gene.”

The _Sun_ has been richly fortunate in the humour that has tinged its news columns since its very beginning. Even Ben Day, with all the worries of a pioneer journalist, made the types exact a smile from his readers. With Dana, amusing the people was second only to instructing them. Julian Ralph and Wilbur Chamberlin both had the trick of putting together the bricks of fact with the mortar of humour. Chamberlin had several characters, like his _Insec’ O’Connor_, whose strings he pulled and made to dance. Hardly a sea-story of Sam Wood’s--except where there is tragedy--does not contain something to be laughed over. Samuel Hopkins Adams was an adept at the comic twist. Lindsay Denison once wrote a story of a semipublic celebration of an engagement so delightfully that the bride’s father, perhaps the only person in New York who did not see the humour of the affair, threatened to break the pledge of troth, although the groom was a public character who had courted publicity all his life.

Charles Selden, as grave a reporter as ever glowered at a poor space-bill, had a vein of structural humour perhaps unsurpassed by any reporter. His account of a press reception at the home of Miss Lillian Russell has been approached in delicacy only by O’Malley’s interview with Miss Laura Jean Libbey. Selden’s story of the occasion when creditors took away all the furniture of John L. Sullivan’s café--except the one chair upon which the champion snoozed--was a model of dry, unlaboured humour.

As an example of the drollness with which O’Malley has delighted _Sun_ readers for ten years, take this extract from his report of the East Side Passover parade of 1917, referring to Counselor Levy, the Duke of Essex Street, whose title was conferred by the _Sun_ twenty years ago:

It was difficult for a time to get the details of the duke’s
Passover garb, owing to the fact that the interior of his
Nile-green limousine has recently been fitted up with
book-shelves, so that the duke can be surrounded with his law
library even when motoring to and from his office on the East
Side. Furthermore, every space not occupied by the duke and
duchess and the law library yesterday was decorated with floral
set pieces in honor of Easter, a large pillow of tuberoses
inscribed with the words “Our Duke” in purple immortelles,
and presented by the Essex Market Bar Association to their
dean, being the outstanding piece among the interior floral
decorations of the duke’s Rolls-Royce. Beside Ittchee, the
duke’s Jap valet and chauffeur, was a large rubber-plant, which
shut off the view, the rubber-plant being the Easter gift of
Solomon, Solomon, Solomon, Solomon, Solomon and Solomon, who
learned all their law as students in the offices of the duke.

Little or nothing remains to be told about the duke’s Easter
scenery. He was dressed in the mode, that’s all--high hat,
morning coat, trousers like Martin Littleton’s, mauve spats,
corn-colored gloves, patent-leather shoes, Russian-red cravat,
set off with a cameo showing the face of Lord Chief Justice
Russell in high relief. His only distinctive mark was the
absence of a gardenia on his lapel.

He was off then, waving his snakewood cane jauntily, while the
East Side scrambled after the car to try to feel the Nile-green
varnish. And with a final direction to Ittchee, “Go around by
Chauncey Depew’s house on the way home, my good man,” the car
exploded northward, and the Passover parade on Delancey Street
officially ended for the day.

There is hardly a man who has lived five years as a _Sun_ reporter but could write his own story of the _Sun_ just as he has written stories of life. Here but a few of these men and their work have been touched. It has been a long parade from Wisner of 1833 to Hill of 1918. Many of the great reporters are dead, and of some of these it may be said that their lives were shortened by the very fever in which they won their glory. Some passed on to other fields of endeavour. Others are waiting to write “the best story ever printed in the _Sun_.”

What was the best story ever printed in the _Sun_? It may be that that story has been quoted from in these articles; and yet, if a thousand years hence some super-scientist should invent a literary measure that would answer the question, the crown of that high and now unbestowable honour of authorship might fall to some man here unmentioned and elsewhere unsung. Perhaps it was an article only two hundred words long.