THE REPORTER WHO MADE HIMSELF KING
The Old Time Journalist will tell you that the best reporter
is the one who works his way up. He holds that the only way
to start is as a printer's devil or as an office boy, to learn
in time to set type, to graduate from a compositor into a
stenographer, and as a stenographer take down speeches at
public meetings, and so finally grow into a real reporter,
with a fire badge on your left suspender, and a speaking
acquaintance with all the greatest men in the city, not even
excepting Police Captains.
That is the old time journalist's idea of it. That is the way
he was trained, and that is why at the age of sixty he is
still a reporter. If you train up a youth in this way, he
will go into reporting with too full a knowledge of the
newspaper business, with no illusions concerning it, and with
no ignorant enthusiasms, but with a keen and justifiable
impression that he is not paid enough for what he does. And
he will only do what he is paid to do.
Now, you cannot pay a good reporter for what he does, because
he does not work for pay. He works for his paper. He gives
his time, his health, his brains, his sleeping hours, and his
eating hours, and sometimes his life, to get news for it. He
thinks the sun rises only that men may have light by which to
read it. But if he has been in a newspaper office from his
youth up, he finds out before he becomes a reporter that this
is not so, and loses his real value. He should come right out
of the University where he has been doing "campus notes" for
the college weekly, and be pitchforked out into city work
without knowing whether the Battery is at Harlem or Hunter's
Point, and with the idea that he is a Moulder of Public
Opinion and that the Power of the Press is greater than the
Power of Money, and that the few lines he writes are of more
value in the Editor's eyes than is the column of advertising
on the last page, which they are not.
After three years--it is sometimes longer, sometimes not so
long--he finds out that he has given his nerves and his youth
and his enthusiasm in exchange for a general fund of
miscellaneous knowledge, the opportunity of personal encounter
with all the greatest and most remarkable men and events that
have risen in those three years, and a great fund of resource
and patience. He will find that he has crowded the
experiences of the lifetime of the ordinary young business
man, doctor, or lawyer, or man about town, into three short
years; that he has learned to think and to act quickly, to be
patient and unmoved when everyone else has lost his head,
actually or figuratively speaking; to write as fast as another
man can talk, and to be able to talk with authority on matters
of which other men do not venture even to think until they
have read what he has written with a copy-boy at his elbow on
the night previous.
It is necessary for you to know this, that you may understand
what manner of man young Albert Gordon was.
Young Gordon had been a reporter just three years. He had
left Yale when his last living relative died, and had taken
the morning train for New York, where they had promised him
reportorial work on one of the innumerable Greatest New York
Dailies. He arrived at the office at noon, and was sent back
over the same road on which he had just come, to Spuyten
Duyvil, where a train had been wrecked and everybody of
consequence to suburban New York killed. One of the old
reporters hurried him to the office again with his "copy," and
after he had delivered that, he was sent to the Tombs to talk
French to a man in Murderers' Row, who could not talk anything
else, but who had shown some international skill in the use of
a jimmy. And at eight, he covered a flower-show in Madison
Square Garden; and at eleven was sent over the Brooklyn Bridge
in a cab to watch a fire and make guesses at the losses to the
insurance companies.
He went to bed at one, and dreamed of shattered locomotives,
human beings lying still with blankets over them, rows of
cells, and banks of beautiful flowers nodding their heads to
the tunes of the brass band in the gallery. He decided when
he awoke the next morning that he had entered upon a
picturesque and exciting career, and as one day followed
another, he became more and more convinced of it, and more and
more devoted to it. He was twenty then, and he was now
twenty-three, and in that time had become a great reporter,
and had been to Presidential conventions in Chicago,
revolutions in Hayti, Indian outbreaks on the Plains, and
midnight meetings of moonlighters in Tennessee, and had seen
what work earthquakes, floods, fire, and fever could do in
great cities, and had contradicted the President, and borrowed
matches from burglars. And now he thought he would like to
rest and breathe a bit, and not to work again unless as a war
correspondent. The only obstacle to his becoming a great war
correspondent lay in the fact that there was no war, and a war
correspondent without a war is about as absurd an individual
as a general without an army. He read the papers every
morning on the elevated trains for war clouds; but though
there were many war clouds, they always drifted apart, and
peace smiled again. This was very disappointing to young
Gordon, and he became more and more keenly discouraged.
And then as war work was out of the question, he decided to
write his novel. It was to be a novel of New York life, and
he wanted a quiet place in which to work on it. He was
already making inquiries among the suburban residents of his
acquaintance for just such a quiet spot, when he received an
offer to go to the Island of Opeki in the North Pacific Ocean,
as secretary to the American consul at that place. The
gentleman who had been appointed by the President to act as
consul at Opeki was Captain Leonard T. Travis, a veteran of
the Civil War, who had contracted a severe attack of
rheumatism while camping out at night in the dew, and who on
account of this souvenir of his efforts to save the Union had
allowed the Union he had saved to support him in one office or
another ever since. He had met young Gordon at a dinner, and
had had the presumption to ask him to serve as his secretary,
and Gordon, much to his surprise, had accepted his offer. The
idea of a quiet life in the tropics with new and beautiful
surroundings, and with nothing to do and plenty of time in
which to do it, and to write his novel besides, seemed to
Albert to be just what he wanted; and though he did not know
nor care much for his superior officer, he agreed to go with
him promptly, and proceeded to say good-by to his friends and
to make his preparations. Captain Travis was so delighted
with getting such a clever young gentleman for his secretary,
that he referred to him to his friends as "my attache of
legation;" nor did he lessen that gentleman's dignity by telling
anyone that the attache's salary was to be five hundred
dollars a year. His own salary was only fifteen hundred
dollars; and though his brother-in-law, Senator Rainsford,
tried his best to get the amount raised, he was unsuccessful.
The consulship to Opeki was instituted early in the '50's, to
get rid of and reward a third or fourth cousin of the
President's, whose services during the campaign were
important, but whose after-presence was embarrassing. He had
been created consul to Opeki as being more distant and
unaccessible than any other known spot, and had lived and died
there; and so little was known of the island, and so difficult
was communication with it, that no one knew he was dead, until
Captain Travis, in his hungry haste for office, had uprooted
the sad fact. Captain Travis, as well as Albert, had a
secondary reason for wishing to visit Opeki. His physician
had told him to go to some warm climate for his rheumatism,
and in accepting the consulship his object was rather to
follow out his doctor's orders at his country's expense, than
to serve his country at the expense of his rheumatism.
Albert could learn but very little of Opeki; nothing, indeed,
but that it ...
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