I blinked. Then I read it again. I shut my eyes, and opened them again suddenly. The fat German letters spoke their message as before—“English spoken here.”
On reaching the office I told Norberg, the city editor, about my find. He was not impressed. Norberg never is impressed. He is the most soul-satisfying and theatrical city editor that I have ever met. He is fat, and unbelievably nimble, and keen-eyed, and untiring. He says, “Hell!” when things go wrong; he smokes innumerable cigarettes, inhaling the fumes and sending out the thin wraith of smoke with little explosive sounds between tongue and lips; he wears blue shirts, and no collar to speak of, and his trousers are kept in place only by a miracle and an inefficient looking leather belt.
When he refused to see the story in the little German bakery sign I began to argue.
“But man alive, this is America! I think I know a story when I see it. Suppose you were traveling in Germany, and should come across a sign over a shop, saying: ‘Hier wird Deutsch gesprochen.’ Wouldn’t you think you were dreaming?”
Norberg waved an explanatory hand. “This isn’t America. This is Milwaukee. After you’ve lived here a year or so you’ll understand what I mean. If we should run a story of that sign, with a two-column cut, Milwaukee wouldn’t even see the joke.”
But it was not necessary that I live in Milwaukee a year or so in order to understand its peculiarities, for I had a personal conductor and efficient guide in the new friend that had come into my life with the first day of my work on the Post. Surely no woman ever had a stronger friend than little “Blackie” Griffith, sporting editor of the Milwaukee Post. We became friends, not step by step, but in one gigantic leap such as sometimes triumphs over the gap between acquaintance and liking.
I never shall forget my first glimpse of him. He strolled into the city room from his little domicile across the hall. A shabby, disreputable, out-at-elbows office coat was worn over his ultra-smart street clothes, and he was puffing at a freakish little pipe in the shape of a miniature automobile. He eyed me a moment from the doorway, a fantastic, elfin little figure. I thought that I had never seen so strange and so ugly a face as that of this little brown Welshman with his lank, black hair and his deep-set, uncanny black eyes. Suddenly he trotted over to me with a quick little step. In the doorway he had looked forty. Now a smile illumined the many lines of his dark countenance, and in some miraculous way he looked twenty.
“Are you the New York importation?” he, asked, his great black eyes searching my face.
“I’m what’s left of it,” I replied, meekly.
“I understand you’ve been in for repairs. Must of met up with somethin’ on the road. They say the goin’ is full of bumps in N’ York.”