My Old Friend, the Chicago Cub Reporter.
Amongst my good old friends is Joe Dillabough, for years on the Chicago press. Joe is Canadian born, but drifted to Chicago in the early ’80’s and was the first cub reporter of the Times. What he doesn’t know of the seamy side of life in that great city is not worth knowing. When Joe was taken ill some years ago, we sent him out to the Canadian Rockies to recuperate, and incidentally to tell the world of the magnificence of the scenery around and about them, and how it enthralled the prominent people from the east. Joe’s first dispatch was about the unfortunate disappearance of a bishop and several priests from some outlandish country, the name of which I have forgotten, in a chasm at Banff, and of their timely rescue by Manager Mathews, of the C.P.R. hotel. It appeared in the Montreal evening papers and on going to Toronto that night I sat beside a stranger while the berths were being made up when he casually remarked that: “This is a queer story in to-night’s paper—this rescue of the bishop and priests from a chasm at Banff.” I asked in what particular way was it queer, and he said he came from that far-away land and they never had a bishop there. And I said, “Oh, Joe.”
Then the next dispatch was about the drowning of a large number of Indians in Lake Louise, while crossing the ice on their way to a potlach. It was widely published. I wrote Joe that there were no Indians in that locality, and if there were, they would not cross the lake but follow the trail around Lake Louise, but if they did cross the ice, they couldn’t possibly drown for the ice was a couple of feet thick. Joe naively replied that there were some of the most elegant liars in the Rocky Mountains he had ever known. My experience is that these talented descendants of Ananias are not altogether confined to that scenic region.
Nearly a generation ago the art of alliteration was worked to death in sensational headings. The Times was easily first in this particular, and one fine morning shocked and startled the community by its blasphemous caption “Jerked to Jesus,” which appeared following the hanging of a murderer who was himself the medium for the suggestion. The copyreader was Clinton A. Snowden, then one of the bright young men on the Times’ staff. Snowden went to Tacoma about 1892. It was he who hit upon the plan of sending George Francis Train, the great national crank, around the world on a 60-day tour, “Tacoma to Tacoma,” to beat the record of Phineas Fogg, the Jules Verne character in “Around the World in Eighty Days.” By the same token Train was the original of Fogg in the Verne story. It will be recalled that Nellie Bly, a Canadian newspaper woman working in New York, set out to out-do Train’s record and beat it by a day or so. Nellie was a Brockville girl or from one of the towns near there. Train, by the way, was a financial genius in his younger days and the real father-promoter of the Union Pacific Railway. He introduced “trams” in London and Australia.