Deacon Stillman was born only eighteen months after the Sun—Ben Day’s Sun; but even as this is being written he is strolling up and down a corridor in the Sun office, waiting for another old-timer, some mere lad of sixty, to come out and have dinner with him.
Under Cummings was developed a young man who turned out to be one of the great city editors of New York—John B. Bogart, of whom Arthur Brisbane wrote that he was the best teacher of journalism that America had produced. He was in most respects the opposite of Cummings. He had all of Cummings’s love for the business, but not his tremendous rush. Cummings was an explosion, Bogart a steady flame. Cummings roared, Bogart was gentle.
Like Cummings and Stillman, Bogart was a Union veteran. In 1861, when he was only sixteen years old, he left the New Haven store where he was a clerk and enlisted in the Seventh Connecticut Volunteers. After serving three years in the army, he returned home to become a bookkeeper in a dry-goods store. He went on the Sun February 21, 1871, as a general reporter. On March 17, 1873—his twenty-eighth birthday—he was made city editor, the former city editor, William Young, having been promoted to the managing editor’s desk to take the place of Cummings, whose health was poor.
John Bogart remained at the city desk for seventeen years of tireless work. He was a master of journalistic detail, a patient follower-up of the stories which, like periscopes, appear and reappear on the sea of events.
“He was a whole school of journalism in himself,” Brisbane wrote of Bogart years afterward. “He could tell the young men where to go for their news, what questions to ask, what was and what was not worth while. Above all, he could give enthusiasm to his men. He worked by encouraging, not by harsh criticism.”
Bogart always asked a young reporter whether he had read the Sun that morning. If one confessed that he had read only part of it, Bogart would invite him to sit down, and would say:
“Mr. Jones, it is one of the salutary customs of this paper that every reporter shall read everything in it before appearing for duty. Don’t even skip the advertisements, because there are stories concealed in many of them. The Sun is good breakfast-food.”
The custom of Bogart’s time is the custom still, but a reporter has to go harder at his reading than he did in the days of the four-page Sun.
If a new reporter had not absorbed the Sun style, Bogart gently tried to saturate him with it.
“I notice,” he said to a man who had covered a little fire the night before, “that you begin your story with ‘at an early hour yesterday morning,’ and that you say also that ‘smoke was seen issuing from an upper window.’”