Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

I suppose the grewsome connotations of the name led to our practice of collecting relics of the tragedies we were constantly reporting. When he came back from the Dakotas, where he had been reporting the Sioux War, Seymour brought back from the battles a number of skulls of Indians, and blankets drenched in blood, which were hung on the walls of the club. From that time on it became the practice of sheriffs and newspaper men everywhere to send anything of that kind to the Whitechapel Club. The result was that within a few years it had a large collection of skulls of criminals, and some physicians discovered, or thought they discovered, differences between these skulls and the skulls of those who were not criminals, or, if they were, had not been caught at it.

These and the ropes of hangmen and the various mementos of crimes were the decorations of the club rooms, and on Saturday nights the hollow eyes of those skulls looked down on many a lively scene.

Admission to the club was obtained in a peculiar way. An applicant for membership had his name proposed, and it was then posted on a bulletin-board. He was on probation for thirty days, during which he had to be at the club at least five days in the week, in order to become acquainted with the members. Within that time any member could tear his name down, and that ended his candidacy. When his name finally came up for voting it required the full vote of the club to get him in.

And then we grew prosperous, and acquiring a building farther down the alley, we had it decorated in a somber manner, with a notable table, shaped like a coffin, around which we gathered. But the prosperity and the fame of the club led to its end. Rich and important men of Chicago sought membership. Some were admitted, then more, and as a result the club lost its Bohemian character, and finally disbanded.

VIII

Those who are able to recall the symposium of these minds will no doubt always see the humorous face of Charlie Seymour as the center of the coterie, a young man with such a flair for what was news, with such an instinct for word values, such real ability as a writer, and such a quaint and original strain of humor as to make him the peer of any, a young man who would have gone far and high could he have lived. An early fate overtook him, as it overtook Charlie Perkins and Charlie Almy and Ben King, but their fate had the mellowing kindness of the fact that all who knew them can never think of them, with however much regret, without a smile at some remembered instance of their unfailing humor.

When I mentioned them, I had fully intended to give some instances of that humor, but when it was not of a raciness, it was of such a rare and delicate charm, such a fleeting, evanescent quality, that it is impossible to separate it from all that was going on about it. It is easy enough to recall if not to evoke again the scene in which Ben King and Charlie Almy, sitting for three hours at a stretch, gave a wholly impromptu impersonation of two solemn missionaries just returned from some unmapped wilderness and recounting their deeds in order to inspire contributions; it is not difficult either to recall the slight figure of Charlie Seymour, with his red hair, his comedian’s droll face, and to listen to him recounting those adventures which life was ever offering him, whether on one of his many journeys as a war correspondent to the region of the Dakotas when his friends among the Ogallalla and Brûlé Sioux were on the war-path again, or in some less picturesque tragedy he had been reporting nearer home—say a murder in South Clark Street; but, like so many of the keener joys of life, the charm of his stories was fleeting and gone with the moment that gave them.

His humor colored everything he wrote, as the humor of Finley Peter Dunne colored everything he wrote; and both were skilled in the art of the news story. We were all reading Kipling in those days, and Mr. Dunne was so clever in adapting his terse style to the needs of the daily reportorial life that when one night a private shot a comrade in the barracks at Fort Sheridan, and Mr. Dunne was detailed to report the tragedy, he found it in every detail so exactly like Kipling’s story “In the Matter of a Private,” that he was overcome by the despair of having to write a tale that had already been told. He resisted the temptation, if there was any temptation, nobly and wrote the tale with a bald simplicity that no doubt enhanced its effect. He had not then begun to report the Philosophy of Mr. Dooley, though there was a certain Irishman in Chicago responsive to the name of Colonel Thomas Jefferson Dolan, whom, in his capacity of First Ward Democrat, Mr. Dunne frequently interviewed for his paper without the cramping influences of a previous visitation on the Colonel, and these interviews showed much of the color and spirit of those Dooley articles which later were to make him famous. He already knew, of course, and frequently enjoyed communion with the prototype of Mr. Dooley, Mr. James McGarry, who had a quaint philosophy of his own which Mr. Dunne one day rendered in a little article entitled “Mr. McGarry’s Philosophy.” The familiarity so wounded Mr. McGarry, however (he was a man of simple dignity and some sensitiveness), that Mr. Dunne thereafter adopted another name for the personage through which he was so long and so brilliantly to express himself, though it was not until after the Spanish War that the wide public was to recognize the talent which was already so abundantly recognized by Mr. Dunne’s friends.

Charlie Seymour did not read as much as some of his companions; perhaps it was that fact that gave such an original flavor to what he wrote. His elder brother, Mr. Horatio W. Seymour, was the editor of the Herald, a newspaper famed for the taste and even beauty of its typographical appearance. It looked somewhat like the New York Sun, and under Mr. Seymour was as carefully edited. It was the organ of the Democracy in the northwest, and I suppose no direct or immediate influence was more potent in bringing on the wide Democratic victory in the congressional election of 1890 than the brilliant editorials on the tariff which Mr. Horatio Seymour wrote. They were, I remember, one of the delights of Frank Hurd, and it was through Hurd’s influence that I was on the staff of that paper, reporting political events.

We were all more or less employed in reporting political events in that stirring year, and were kept busy in following and recording the sayings of the orators of both parties. It was characteristic of Mr. Dunne that after a sober column giving the gist of a speech by Joseph B. Foraker, then lately governor, and afterward senator of Ohio, in which he waved the bloody shirt in the fiery manner which in those days characterized him, Mr. Dunne should have concluded his article sententiously: “Then the audience went out to get the latest news of the battle of Gettysburg.”