Mark Maguire, the celebrated “Toppy,” was the chief of the sporting writers. He was about the oldest man in the Sun office, born before Napoleon went to Elba. He was the first king of the New York newsboys, and Barney Williams, the boy who first sold Ben Day’s Sun, once worked for him.
Maguire had as customers, when they visited New York, Jackson, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. When prosperity came to him he opened road-houses that were the resorts of horse-owners like Commodore Vanderbilt and Robert Bonner. His Cayuga House, at McComb’s Dam, was named after his own fast trotter, Cayuga Girl. Maguire’s intimacy with Bonner was such that the hangers-on in the racing game believed that Bonner owned the Sun and transmitted his views to Dana through “Toppy.” Maguire worked for the Sun up to his death in 1889.
When Amos Cummings had an evening to spare from his regular news work he would go with Maguire to a prize-fight and write the story of it. Maguire invented the chart by which a complete record of the blows struck in a boxing match is kept—one circle for the head and one for the body of each contestant, with a pencil-mark for every blow landed. After an evening in which Jem Mace was one of the entertainers, Maguire’s chart looked like a shotgun target, but Cummings, who watched the fighters while Mark tallied the blows, would make a live story from it.
The Sun of that day had women reporters; indeed, it had the first real woman reporter in American journalism, Mrs. Emily Verdery Battey. She worked on fashion stories, women’s-rights stories, and general-news stories. She was one of the Georgia Verderys, and she went on the Sun shortly after Mr. Dana took hold. Her brother, George Verdery, was also a Sun reporter. Another Sun woman of that time was Miss Anna Ballard, who wrote, among other things, the news stories that bobbed up in the surrogates’ court.
The dramatic criticisms of the Sun, in the first three or four years of the seventies, were written by two young lawyers recently graduated from the law school of New York University, Willard Bartlett and Elihu Root. Bartlett was a year the younger, but he ranked Root as a critic because of his acquaintance—through his father, W. O. Bartlett—with newspaper ways. If Lester Wallack was putting on “Ours,” that would be Mr. Bartlett’s assignment, while Mr. Root went to report the advance of art at Woods’s Museum, where was the Lydia Thompson troupe. If it befell that on the same evening Edwin Booth produced “Hamlet” in a new setting and George L. Fox appeared in a more glorious than ever “Humpty Dumpty,” Critic Bartlett would see Booth; Assistant Critic Root, Fox.
In time these young journalists passed on to be actors in that more complex and perhaps equally interesting drama, the law, which for fourteen years they practised together. Mr. Bartlett figured as one of Mr. Dana’s counsel in several of the Sun’s legal cases. After thirty years on the bench, retiring from the chief judgeship of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York through the age statute in 1916, Judge Bartlett is still actively interested in the Sun, and many of its articles on legal and literary topics are contributed by him.
As for Mr. Root, his friendship with the Sun has been unbroken for almost fifty years, and he has made more news for it than most men. Under such circumstances even the most jealous newspaper is willing to forgive the desertion of an assistant dramatic critic.
It was Willard Bartlett, incidentally, who was the inventor of the Sun’s celebrated office cat. One night in the eighties the copy of a message from President Cleveland to Congress came to the desk of the telegraph editor. It was a warm evening, and the window near the telegraph desk was open. The message fluttered out and was lost in Nassau Street. The Sun had nothing about it the next morning, and in the afternoon, when Mr. Bartlett called on Mr. Dana, the matter of the lost message was under discussion. The editor remarked that it was a matter difficult to explain to the readers.
“Oh, say that the office cat ate it up,” suggested Bartlett.
Dana chuckled and dictated a paragraph creating the cat. Instantly the animal became famous. Newspapers pictured it as Dana’s inseparable companion, and the Sun presently had another, and longer, editorial article about the wonderful beast: