He has made it his business to know men in all parts of the country, and to know them so they will tell him as much of the truth as they will tell anybody. He is tenacious of his opinions and loyal to his friends. He is jolly, good-natured, companionable, and a fine chap to have around when he is in repose. Wherever men spoke the English language he was known as “Riggs—of the Sun.”
Reputation and success in newspaper work demand the highest and most unselfish loyalty to one’s paper. It must be the paper first and nothing else second. Loyalty is Riggs’s first attribute, even better than his courage.
The influence of a man like Riggs cannot be estimated. There is no way of computing this, but there is no person who will deny that he has been a power. He has not had his head turned by flattery. He has been “Riggs—of the Sun.”
One of Mr. Riggs’s last great pieces of newspaper work was a twenty-thousand-word history of national conventions which appeared in the Sun in 1912—the first history of its kind ever written. Mr. Riggs was also a frequent contributor to the editorial page.
Arthur Brisbane, when he became a Sun reporter in 1882, was almost the youngest reporter the Sun had had; he went to work on his eighteenth birthday. He had been intensively educated in America and abroad. In his first three or four months he was a puzzle to his superiors, his colleagues, and perhaps to himself.
“He sat around,” said one of his contemporary reporters, “like a fellow who didn’t understand what it was all about—and then he came out of his trance like a shot from a gun and seemed to know everything about everything.”
Brisbane was well liked. He was a handsome, athletic youth, interested in all lines of life and literature, cheerful, and eager for adventurous assignment. After two years of reportorial work he went to France to continue certain studies, and while he was there the Sun offered to him the post of London correspondent, which he accepted.
In March, 1888, when John L. Sullivan and Charley Mitchell went to Chantilly, in France, for their celebrated fight, Brisbane went with them and wrote a good two-column story about it—a story that contained never a word of pugilistic slang but a great deal of interest. He saw the human side:
Deeply interested were the handfuls of Frenchmen who gathered and watched from such a safe and distant pavilion as we would select to look upon a hyena fight.
And, when other reporters were deafened by the battle, Brisbane heard the plaintive appeal of Baldock, Mitchell’s tough second: