From the ranks of the novelists and magazine editors and writers come men like Will Irwin, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Robert Welles Ritchie, Albert W. Atwood, Henry James Forman, Cameron Mackenzie, Kirk Munroe, Charles Mason Fairbanks, Robert R. Whiting, James L. Ford, E. J. Edwards, Arthur F. Aldridge, George B. Mallon, Gustav Kobbé, and Frederick Kinney Noyes.
From the lists of newspaper owners and editors come Arthur Brisbane, of the Washington Times; Edward H. Mott, of the Goshen Republican; Frank H. Simonds, of the New York Tribune; Martin J. Hutchins, of the Chicago Journal; C. L. Sherman, of the Hartford Courant.
From the staffs of other New York newspapers come Charles Selden, Carr V. Van Anda, and Richard V. Oulahan, of the Times; William A. Willis, of the Herald; Rudolph E. Block, of the American; J. Arthur Seavey, of the Tribune; and Lindsay Denison, of the Evening World.
From the bench come Judges Willard Bartlett, Warren W. Foster, and Willard H. Olmsted; from government work, Stephen T. Mather, Robert Sterling Yard, and E. W. Townsend; from business, Edward G. Riggs, Willis Holly, Collin Armstrong, Oscar King Davis, Robert Grier Cooke, John H. O’Brien, and Roy Mason. If the racing season is over in Cuba, C. J. Fitzgerald is present. If business on the San Diego Sun is not too brisk, its editor, Clarence McGrew, crosses the continent to be at the feast. Until his death in 1917, Franklin Matthews, associate professor of journalism at Columbia University, who was with the Sun from 1890 to 1909 in many capacities, was one of the leading spirits of the Alumni. Dr. Talcott Williams, chief of the school of journalism, is another enthusiastic alumnus.
These men, the outsider observes, gather and talk in groups. The men of the eighties recall the wonders of the four-page Sun and its Bogarts, Ralphs, and Cummingses. Men of the nineties chat of the feats of “Jersey” Chamberlin and “Commodore” Spears. The alumni who matriculated in the present century speak of Riggs and Irwin, Denison and O’Malley and Hill. But all talk of the Sun, and of Dana and Mitchell and Lord and Clarke.
It is only when they speak of reporters that there is a grouping of heroes. That is because it is a natural and pleasant practice, if an illogical one, for newspapermen of the present and previous decades to look back to this or that period of a paper and say:
“That was the day! The names of the men on the staff prove it.”
An old Sun man will point, for instance, to the Sun’s roster of reporters in 1893, when the local staff included:
Julian Ralph
John R. Spears
Oscar K. Davis
C. J. Fitzgerald
Carr V. Van Anda
David Graham Phillips
George B. Mallon
Samuel Hopkins Adams
Daniel F. Kellogg
C. M. Fairbanks
Lawrence Reamer
W. J. Chamberlin
Edward G. Riggs
E. W. Townsend
Rudolph E. Block
Samuel A. Wood
E. D. Beach
E. O. Chamberlin
Victor Speer
Joseph Vila
W. A. Willis
Collin Armstrong
The weak place in this sort of retrospection is that after twenty-five years the observer’s focus is twisted. Julian Ralph was a great reporter in 1893, but W. J. Chamberlin, whose name is linked with Ralph’s among great Sun reporters, was only just arriving. John R. Spears had made his reputation, but Riggs’s fame as a political writer was not yet established. Townsend had tickled New York with his “Chimmie Fadden” stories, but Sam Adams was a cub. Wood, Vila, and Reamer were not as important to the Sun in 1893 as they are at this writing.