“Just the man for me!” replied Dana, according to the version which Cummings used to tell.
At any rate, Amos went on the Sun as managing editor, and he continued to swear. The compositors now in the Sun office who remember him at all remember him largely for that.
The union once set apart a day for contributions to the printers’-home fund, and each compositor was to contribute the fruits of a thousand ems of composition. Cummings, who was proud of being a union printer, left his managing-editor’s desk and went to the composing-room.
“Ah, Mr. Cummings,” said Abe Masters, the foreman, “I’ll give you some of your own copy to set.”
“To hell with my own copy!” said Cummings, who knew his handwriting faults. “Give me some reprint.”
Green reporters got a taste of the Cummings profanity. One of them put a French phrase in a story. Cummings asked him what it meant, and the youth told him.
“Then why the hell didn’t you write it that way?” yelled Cummings. “This paper is for people who read English!”
In those days murderers were executed in the old Tombs prison in Centre Street. Cummings, who was full of enterprise, sought a way to get quickly the fall of the drop. The telephone had not been perfected, but there was a shot-tower north of the Sun’s office and east of the Tombs. Cummings sent one man to the Tombs, with instructions to wave a flag upon the instant of the execution. Another man, stationed at the top of the shot-tower, had another flag, with which he was to make a sign to Cummings on the roof of the Sun Building, as soon as he saw the flag move at the prison.
The reporter at the Tombs arranged with a keeper to notify him just before the execution, but the keeper was sent on an errand, and presently Cummings, standing nervously on the roof of the Sun Building, heard the newsboys crying the extras of a rival sheet. The plan had fallen through. No blanks could adequately represent the Cummings temper upon that occasion.
Cummings was probably the best all-round news man of his day. He had the executive ability and the knowledge of men that make a good managing editor. He knew what Dana knew—that the newspapers had yet to touch public sympathy and imagination in the news columns as well as in editorial articles; and he knew how to do it, how to teach men to do it, how to cram the moving picture of a living city into the four pages of the Sun. He advised desk men, complimented or corrected reporters, edited local articles, and, when a story appealed to him strongly, he went out and got it and wrote it himself.