“Wait a moment while I go into the telegraph office and wire my paper that I expect exciting news to-day.”
At that hour there was no apparent reason to expect any news out of the ordinary, but it was only a few hours later that Maître Labori, Dreyfus’s counsel, was shot down on his way to court.
Young newspapermen who are fortunate enough to be possessed of—or by—the sixth sense must remember, however, that it cannot be relied upon to sound the alarm on every occasion. Mr. Bogart, who felt that he had a friend in the current of news, kept close track of the assignment-book. As a city editor he was unsurpassed for his diligence in following up news stories. One day he assigned Brainerd G. Smith, afterward professor of journalism at Cornell, to report the first reception given by Judge Hilton after the death of the judge’s partner, A. T. Stewart.
“And above all,” Mr. Bogart wound up, “don’t leave the house without asking Judge Hilton whether they’ve found Stewart’s body yet.”
Julian Ralph attributed his success as a journalist chiefly to three things—a liking for his work, the ability to get what he was sent for, and good humour. He omitted mention of something which distinguished him and Chamberlin and all other great reporters—hard work. Ralph himself gives a brief but complete picture of a day’s hard work in his description, in “The Making of a Journalist,” of the way in which he reported the inauguration of a President:
I had myself called at five o’clock in the morning, and, having a cab at hand, mounted the box with the negro driver and traveled about the city from end to end and side to side. I did this to see the people get up and the trains roll in and the soldiers turn out—to catch the capital robing like a bride for her wedding.
After breakfast, eaten calmly, I made another tour of the town, and then began to approach the subject more closely, calling at the White House, mingling with the crowds in the principal hotels, moving between the Senate and the House of Representatives, to report the hurly-burly of the closing moments of a dying administration. I saw the old and the new President, and then witnessed the inauguration ceremonies and the parade.
Then, having seen the new family in place in the White House, I took a hearty luncheon, and sat down at half past one o’clock to write steadily for twelve hours, with plenty of pencils and pads and messenger-boys at hand, and with my notebook supplemented by clippings from all the afternoon papers, covering details to which I might or might not wish to refer. Cigars, a sandwich or two at supper-time, and a stout horn of brandy late at night were my other equipments.
As Ralph remarked, that was hard work, but it was nothing when compared with the job of reporting a national convention. “One needs only to see an inauguration,” he said. “In a national convention one must know.”
Wilbur J. Chamberlin’s name is not in any book of American biography. In library indexes his name is found only as the author of “Ordered to China,” a series of letters he wrote to his wife while on the assignment to report the Boxer rebellion—one of the many pieces of Sun work which he did faithfully and well. He never found time to write books, although he wished to do so. He was a Sun man from the day he went on the staff, in 1890, until the day of his death, August 14, 1901.