Before that day there had been no newsboys; no papers were sold in the streets. The big, blanket political organs that masqueraded as newspapers were either sold over the counter or delivered by carriers to the homes of the subscribers. Most of the publishers considered it undignified even to angle for new subscribers, and one of them boasted that his great circulation of perhaps two thousand had come unsolicited.
The first unemployed person to apply for a job selling Suns in the streets was a ten-year-old-boy, Bernard Flaherty, born in Cork. Years afterward two continents knew him as Barney Williams, Irish comedian, hero of “The Emerald Ring,” and “The Connie Soogah,” and at one time manager of Wallack’s old Broadway Theatre.
When Day got some regular subscribers, he sent carriers on routes. He charged them sixty-seven cents a hundred, cash, or seventy-five cents on credit. The first of these carriers was Sam Messenger, who delivered the Sun in the Fulton Market district, and who later became a rich livery-stable keeper. Live lads like these, carrying out Day’s idea, wrought the greatest change in journalism that ever had been made, for they brought the paper to the people, something that could not be accomplished by the six-cent sheets with their lofty notions and comparatively high prices.
On the third day of the Sun’s life, with Wisner at the pen and Barney Flaherty “hollering” in the startled streets, the editor again expressed, this time more positively, his yearning that something would happen:
We newspaper people thrive best on the calamities of others. Give us one of your real Moscow fires, or your Waterloo battle-fields; let a Napoleon be dashing with his legions through the world, overturning the thrones of a thousand years and deluging the world with blood and tears; and then we of the types are in our glory.
The yearner had to wait thirty years for another Waterloo, but he got his “real Moscow fire” in about two years, and so close that it singed his eyebrows.
Lacking a Napoleon to exalt or denounce, Mr. Day used a bit of that same page for the publication of homelier news for the people:
The following are the drawn numbers of the New York consolidated lotteries of yesterday afternoon:
62 6 59 46 61 34 65 37 8 42
So Horace Greeley and his partner, with their tri-weekly paper, could not have been keeping all of the lottery patronage away from the Sun.