Parallel with improvement in skill as a photographer, I developed a working plan to insure more profitable excursions afield. My interested friends among editors and reporters gladly gave me hints about possible out-of-town sources of "stories," and I studied the news columns, even to the fine type of the Missouri and Kansas state notes, with all the avidity of an aged hobo devouring a newspaper in the public library. For every possibility I made out a card index memorandum, as—
KANAPOLIS, KAS.
Geographical center of the country. Once proposed as the capital of the nation—and of the state of Kansas. Now a whistling station and a rock salt plant.
For each memorandum I stuck a pin in the state maps pasted on the wall of my workshop. When there were several pins in any neighborhood, I would sling my kodak over my shoulder, the carrying case strapped to the tripod-top, like a tramp with a bundle at the end of a stick. And then away, with an extra pair of socks and a harmonica for baggage. Besides the material that I felt certain of finding through advance information, luck always could be trusted to turn up some additional "stories." The quickest way to find out what there was to write about in a town was simply to walk into the local newspaper office, introduce myself and ask for some tips about possible "features." I cannot recall that any one ever refused me, or ever failed to think of something worth while.
I do not know yet whether what I discovered then is a business or not, but I made a living out of it. Whereas reporting on a salary had begun to be something of a grind, the less profitable roamings of a free lance furnished a life that had color and everlasting freshness.
Sometimes, trusting in the little gods of the improvident, I was lured into the backwoods of the Ozarks by such a name as "Mountain Home," which caught my fancy on the map; and with no definite "stories" in mind I would go sauntering from Nowhere-in-Particular in Northern Arkansas to Someplace Else in Southern Missouri, snapping pictures by the roadside and scribbling a few necessary notes. One of those excursions, which cost $24.35, has brought a return, to date, of more than $250, which of course does not include the worth of a five days' lark with a young Irishman who went on the trip as a novel form of summer vacation.
He found all the novelty he could have hoped for. After some truly lyric passages of life in Arkansas, when we felt positively homesick about leaving one town to go on to another, we reached a railroad-less county in Missouri infested with fleas; and to secure a discount on the stage fare on the thirty-five-mile drive from Gainsville to West Plains (we had to have a discount to save enough to buy something to eat that night) we played the harmonica for our driver's amusement until we gasped like fish. His soul was touched either by the melody or by pity, and he left us enough small change to provide a supper of cheese and crackers.
Some happenings that must sound much more worth while in the ears of the mundane have followed, but those first days of free lancing seem to me to be among the choicest in a journalistic adventurer's experience. Encounters with a variety of celebrities since then have proved no whit more thrilling than the discovery that our host, Jerry South of Mountain Home, was lieutenant-governor of Arkansas; and though I have roamed in five nations, no food that I ever have tasted so nearly approaches that of the gods as the strawberry shortcake we ate in Bergman.
Even in the crass matter of profits, I found the small town richer in easily harvestable "stories" than the biggest city in the world. A few years later I spent a week in London, but I picked up less there to write about than I found in Sabetha, Kansas, in a single afternoon. Sabetha furnished:
Half of the material for a motor car article. (When automobiles were still a novelty to the rural population.) This sold to Leslie's.