“Cut out the ‘damn,’” said Dr. Wood.
In keeping news down to the bone Wood was of remarkable value to the Sun in those years when Dana showed that it was possible to tell everything in four pages. New York was smaller then, and display advertising had not come to be a science. The Sun got along nicely on its circulation, for the newsdealers paid one and one-third cents for each copy. With the circulation receipts about fourteen hundred dollars a day, the advertising receipts were clear profit. Amos Cummings had such a fierce disregard for the feelings of advertisers that often, when a good piece of news came in late, he would throw out advertising to make room for it.
The city editors of the Sun under Cummings were, in order, John Williams, Lawrence S. Kane, Walter M. Rosebault, William Young, and John B. Bogart. Williams, who had been a Methodist preacher, left the Sun in 1869 to become religious editor of the Herald. Kane, a big blond Irishman with mutton-chop whiskers, held the city desk until the summer of 1870 and then returned to the reportorial staff. Rosebault, who had been one of the Sun’s best young reporters, resigned from the city editorship late in 1870 in order to study law. He afterward went to San Francisco to be principal editorial writer of the Chronicle, but soon returned to New York and for many years, while practising law, he contributed editorial and special articles to the Sun. Mr. Rosebault, who is still an active lawyer, told the present writer, in July, 1918, that of all the reporters who served on his staff when he was city editor of the Sun only one, Sidney Rosenfeld, later a dramatist and the first editor of Puck, was still alive.
The first telegraph editor of the Sun was an Episcopalian clergyman, Arthur Beckwith, afterward connected with the Brooklyn Eagle and the Brooklyn Citizen as a law reporter. When he left the telegraph desk of the Sun his place was taken by Colonel Henry Grenville Shaw, a Civil War veteran. Colonel Shaw left the Sun to become night editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and was succeeded by Amos B. Stillman, a ninety-pound man from Connecticut. He was a newspaperman in his native state until the Civil War, and after Appomattox he went back to Connecticut. He went on the Sun in 1870 as telegraph editor, and stayed on the same desk for forty-five years.
In the early days of Dana’s Sun there were no night editors, for it had not been found necessary to establish a central desk where all the news of all the departments could be gathered together for judgment as to relative value. Each desk man sent his own copy to the composing-room, and the pages were made up by the managing editor or the night city editor after midnight. Leisurely nights, those, with no newspaper trains to catch and no starting of the presses until four o’clock in the morning!
AMOS JAY CUMMINGS
One evening in that period the other desk men in the news department of the Sun observed that Amos Stillman was extraordinarily busy and more than usually silent. He scribbled away, revising despatches and writing subheads, and it was after twelve o’clock when he got up, stretched, and uttered one sentence:
“Quite a fire in Chicago!”
That was the October evening in 1871 when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow started the blaze that consumed seventeen thousand buildings. To Deacon Stillman it was just a busy night.