6
To my long list of unhallowed but frequently pleasant accomplishments I added, in my sixteenth summer, journalism and dancing; I went to work on the Farmington Times and learned to waltz and two-step, and on occasion danced the Virginia Reel and the quadrille with spirit and abandon if not with elegant grace. The practice of journalism was not then, in all quarters, considered a sin of the first magnitude; nor is it so considered to-day except when various Preachers and other goody-bodies find their names mentioned infrequently and their daily denunciations ignored. It is then the fashion to denounce the newspapers, and to deplore the low plane to which the fourth estate has fallen. But in Farmington in my youth the feeling against the Sunday newspaper was so great that it was felt generally that all journalism was at least slightly tainted, and so I list it as a sin. So far as the financial rewards go, it is even now nothing less than a crime.
There was no question about the sinfulness of dancing, especially the round dances, as we used to call the waltz and two-step. In some parts of the country exception was made for the square dances, but everywhere in my section of Missouri the waltz and two-step were considered Steps toward Hell. I frequently heard Preachers and Brothers and Sisters pronounce solemn judgment against young girls who indulged in such heinous practices, and brand them before God and man as abandoned scarlet women glorying in the unsanctified embraces of wicked men. That was the way the Preachers usually talked, too. One man in our town was even criticized for waltzing with his wife.
Not only was the wicked waltz and the devilish two-step, no matter how decorously performed, a Sunday taboo in our town, but in our most religious families it was taboo at all times, and several persons were dismissed from church for participating in such orgies. We had one Preacher who informed us that both Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God because their inhabitants danced and for no other reason, and the prediction was freely made that Farmington was destined for the same dreadful end, and he intimated that we would not even reap the resultant benefits of great fame and publicity. His tirades were strikingly similar to the ones that are being made every day now by the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals against New York City and other centers of sin.
As I have said, for many years the Presbyterians, city slickers at heart, had a virtual monopoly of dancing in Farmington. It was they who introduced the waltz and the two-step, to the great horror of all of our old women, both male and female, and it is they who must be held responsible when God sends His avenging angels to blast and destroy. Occasionally a Baptist or a Methodist backslid sufficiently to trip the light fantastic toe, as I delighted to call it as a juvenile reporter on the Times, but not often; generally the Presbyterians alone thus flaunted their wickedness. But when God failed to perform as expected, others became bold and abandoned all caution, and when I left Farmington, dancing was general and the town was obviously headed straight for Hell. But even then there was very little dancing done on Sunday night.
We had two newspapers in Farmington, the Times and the News, the former owned by Mr. Theodore Fisher and the latter by the Denman brothers, extraordinarily devout members of the Northern Methodist church and leaders in most of the town’s religious activities. Mr. Fisher was a Presbyterian, a liberal at heart, but for business reasons he was unable to do or say anything to stem the tide of prying Puritanism. Both papers were controlled by the churches of the town, and published everything that the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters asked them to; as I grew older, Mr. Fisher became more confidential and frequently expressed his disgust at many things that went on in Farmington, but he was powerless. If he had said a word in favor of a more liberal attitude his paper would have had an even more difficult time getting along, and Heaven knows it was hard enough as it was; Mr. Fisher frequently had to spend all of Saturday morning collecting advertising accounts so he could pay wages in the afternoon. But the News was always very prosperous.
When I went into the newspaper business, or game, as it is called in the motion pictures and the schools of Journalism, I went in with the enthusiastic thoroughness with which I had abandoned myself to a life of sin. Mr. Fisher hired me at $2 a week, during the summer vacation, to be the office devil, and for that princely wage I built the fires each morning, swept the office, carried copy, set type, distributed pi, kicked the job press, cranked the gasoline engine on Thursdays, fed the big roller press, folded the papers, wrote names on them and carried them to the Post Office in sacks. And I had many other duties besides.
These multitudinous activities sufficed me for a few weeks, because in doing them, and in so being engaged in journalistic practice, I had the same feeling that so encouraged me when I danced or drank or smoked cigarettes; I was confident that I was doing something of which the righteous did not wholly approve. But later I became ambitious. I wanted to be an editor. Only God knows why, but I did. So I became an editor; indeed, I became many editors. Using the small job press and Mr. Fisher’s stock of vari-colored inks, I printed cards informing the world that I was sporting editor, society editor, fire editor, crime editor, baseball editor, football editor, financial editor, religious editor, and barber-shop editor, this last because I purposed to interview the customers in Doss’s barber shop.
Thus equipped, I felt able to handle any journalistic problem that might confront me, and I spent my spare time interviewing people and gathering items which, because of the extreme godliness of our citizens, usually consisted of nothing more exciting than announcements that so-and-so was on the sick list, or had been on the sick list and was now improving. When I asked a banker if he knew any news I gravely presented him with my financial-editor card; and when it became my proud duty to interview my youthful idol and our most famous citizen, Mr. Barney Pelty, the major-league baseball pitcher, he learned by ocular proof that I was both sporting editor and baseball editor, and as such fully competent to transmit to type and to posterity his deathless utterances. As I recall them, these were generally that he would be in town to visit his relatives or because some member of his family was on the sick list, and would then return to St. Louis to take up again the onerous duties of his profession. Once he predicted that the Browns would win the pennant, and I wrote this exclusive information with all the large and handsome words at my command, but he was mistaken.
As time went on I became almost everything that it was possible to be on the Times; I was printer, pressman, reporter, mechanic, editor of this and that, and what not. But I was never permitted to write editorials or chronicle the doings of our best people. The Times was passionately addicted to the Democrats, and each week our editorial page trumpeted the widely known and indisputable fact that the Republicans were a lot of skunks. These blasts were written, and well written, by Mr. Fisher himself, and my own share in the good work was merely to put them into type, and occasionally correct Mr. Fisher’s phraseology when I did not think that he had expressed himself clearly. And since these corrections were made at the case after the proof had been corrected, they nearly always got printed, sometimes with dire results. Once Mr. Fisher wrote, in jovial vein, about the gaudy house in which a certain political candidate resided, and I corrected it to read “bawdy house,” holding that the latter was more definitely descriptive.
Another member of Mr. Fisher’s family, who had previously spoken to me pleasantly when she met me on the street but who regarded me as nothing but hired help after I had accepted employment, wrote about the social activities of our first families on Columbia Street and the second and third families in Doss’s Addition. I was occasionally permitted to describe the pitiful doings of the Catholics, the Lutherans and other curious humans down near the ice plant, and the weekly dances given by the abandoned young people at our chief source of civic pride, the insane asylum. But the functions of Society were obviously beyond the descriptive powers of a mere printer’s devil. It was bad enough that such a person had to set the type. Nevertheless I attended these functions, and gained great comfort by inserting my name in the list of those present, and by adding the important and vital information that dainty and delicious refreshments had been served and a good time had by all. If it was a birthday party the host was wished many happy returns of the day. It was my belief at that time that it was against the law to publish an account of a social event without so stating. It was not always true; frequently the refreshments were not delicious and no one had a good time, but in those days I did not have that high regard for the truth that I have since acquired through labors on the great metropolitan journals; indeed, a night seldom passes now that I do not ask myself: “Have I written the truth to-day?” The answer, has, so far, eluded me. But Mr. Fisher, and to an even greater extent the Brothers Denman, sole owners of the News, frankly tried to please the advertisers and the subscribers; there was not then that fine spirit of independence which is such an essential part of modern journalism.
I advanced rapidly on the Times, and eventually was receiving $7 a week and had appointed myself to so many editorships that my cards filled two pockets. I was satisfied, and probably would have remained so for some years, but the end of my allotted time in Farmington was drawing near. I went to Northeast Missouri to visit relatives, and Mr. Fisher discharged me for over-staying my leave. This was a terrific blow; it seemed to me that my journalistic career had been cut off in the flower of its youth. I went to work in a lumber yard, and kept the job until the first carload of cement came in. But after I had pulled and tugged at the ninety-eight-pound sacks for ten hours I concluded that the lumber business held out no glowing promise for a young man who wished to retain his health and have leisure for a reasonable amount of traffic with Satan.
So I resigned and went to Quincy, Ill., where after considerable negotiations I obtained a job as reporter on the Quincy Journal and embarked on a career in daily journalism. So far this has kept me in the cities, where the opportunities for sin are vastly more numerous than in the small towns, but where there is less sin in proportion to the number of inhabitants. This is true despite the horde of wailing prophets and professional devil-chasers and snoopers whose principal occupation is violent and false denunciation of every city large enough to have an electric-light plant. And in a city one can, by diligent search, find a few people who will admit that a man’s religion, or his lack of religion, is his own affair.