“Isn’t that good English?” asked the young man.
“It is excellent English,” Bogart replied calmly, “and it has been indorsed by generations of reporters and copy-readers. If you look in the other papers you will find that some of them also discovered smoke issuing from an upper window at an early hour yesterday morning. We do not deny that it is good English; but it is not good Sun English.”
Never again did smoke issue from an upper window of that reporter’s copy.
Under Cummings and Bogart the Sun turned out Sun men. A young man from Troy, Franklin Fyles, was one of their first police-station reporters. He did not know as many policemen as did Joseph Josephs, who wore a silk hat and a gambler’s mustache, and who covered the West Side stations, but he wrote well. He did not know as many desperate characters as were honoured with the acquaintance of David Davids, the East Side police reporter, but he knew a Sun story when he saw it. In 1875, five years after Fyles came on the Sun, he was the star reporter, and he reported the Beecher trial. Ten thousand words a day in longhand was an easy day’s work for the reports of that great scandal. Fyles became the dramatic critic of the Sun in 1885, and continued as such until 1903. In that period he wrote several plays, including “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” in which David Belasco was his collaborator; “Cumberland ’61,” and “The Governor of Kentucky.” Fyles died in 1911 at the age of 64.
Another police-station reporter of the Sun was Edward Payson Weston, who had been an office-boy in various newspaper offices until about the beginning of the Civil War and had then become a reporter. Before Dana bought the Sun Weston had walked from Portland, Maine, to Chicago—thirteen hundred and twenty-six miles—in twenty-six days. Forty years later he walked it in twenty-five days.
Cummings liked Weston. Whatever faults there may have been in his literary style, his knee action was a perfect poem. He could bring a story down from the Bellevue morgue faster than all the horse-cars. He was the best “leg man” in the history of journalism. In 1910, more than four decades after the Sun first took him on, Weston, then a man of seventy years, walked from Los Angeles to New York in seventy-seven days.
Henry Mann, a Civil War veteran, was the Sun’s principal court reporter. He covered the Tweed and Stokes trials and the impeachment of Judge Barnard. Later he was exchange editor and he is remembered also as the author of “The History of Ancient and Medieval Republics.”
Other Sun reporters were Tom Cook, who came from California, had the shiniest silk hat on Park Row, and knew Fisk and the rest of the Erie crowd; Big Jim Connolly, one of the best news writers of his day; the McAlpin brothers, Robert and Tod; and Chester S. Lord, who was to become the managing editor of the Sun and serve it in that capacity for a third of a century.
William Young, who was city editor when Lord went on the paper, gave him his first assignment—to get a story about the effect of the Whisky Ring’s work on the liquor trade. Lord wrote a light and airy piece which indicated that the ring’s operations would bring highly moral results by decreasing the supply of intoxicants; but when the copy-reader got through with the story this is the way it read:
A Sun reporter interviewed several leading wholesale liquor-dealers yesterday concerning the despatch from Louisville, saying that all the old whisky in the country had been purchased by a Western firm for a rise. They said that they had sold their accumulated stock of prime whisky months ago. One firm, the largest in the city, had sold nearly two thousand barrels, stored since 1858. One shrewd dealer said it was reported that Grant was in the ring, and that he wanted to secure a supply to fall back on in his retirement.