“Think of the kids, Charley, the dear little kids, a calling for you at home and a counting on you for bread! Think what their feelings will be if you don’t knock the ear off him, and knock it off him again!”
Not but what the correspondent paid conscientious attention to the technique of the fray:
A detailed report of each of the thirty-nine rounds taken by me shows that out of more than a hundred wild rushes made by Sullivan, and of which any one would have been followed by a knockout in Madison Square, not half a dozen resulted in anything.
A couple of years after the establishment of the Evening Sun Brisbane was made its managing editor—a big job for a man of twenty-three years. In 1890 he went to the World, where he became the editor of the Sunday magazine and the most illustrious exponent of that startling form of graphic art which demonstrates to the reader, without calling upon his brain for undue effort, how much taller than the Washington Monument would be New York’s daily consumption of dill pickles, if piled monumentwise.
Seven years later Mr. Hearst took Brisbane from Mr. Pulitzer and made him editor of the Evening Journal—a position eminently suited to his talents, for here he was able to write as he wished in that clear, simple style which had endeared him to the Sun.
Brisbane’s newspaper style goes directly back to the writing of William O. Bartlett. It has its terse, cutting qualities, the avoidance of all but the simplest words, and the direct drive at the object to be attained. Brisbane, too, adopted the Dana principle that nothing was more valuable in editorial writing, for the achievement of a purpose, than iteration and reiteration. This was the plan that Dana always followed in his political battles—incessant drum-fire. Brisbane uses it now as proprietor of the Washington Times, which he bought from Frank A. Munsey, the present owner of the Sun, in June, 1917.
John R. Spears was one of the big Sun men for fifteen years. He, like Amos Cummings and Julian Ralph, was brought up in the atmosphere of a printing-office as a small boy; but in 1866, when he was sixteen years old, he entered the Naval Academy at Annapolis and spent a couple of years as a naval cadet. His cruise around the world in a training-ship filled him with a love of the sea that never left him. His marine knowledge helped him and the Sun, for which he wrote fine stories of the international yacht-races between the Mayflower and the Galatea (1886) and the Volunteer and the Thistle (1887).
Spears liked wild life on land, too, and the Sun sent him into the mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky to tell of the feuds of the Hatfields and the McCoys. He went into the Ozarks to write up the Bald Knobbers, and he sent picturesque stories, in the eighties, from No Man’s Land, that unappropriated strip between Kansas and Texas which knew no law from 1850, when it was taken from Mexico, until 1890, when it became a part of the new State of Oklahoma.
Spears was a hard worker. They said of him in the Sun office that he never went out on an assignment without bringing in the material for a special article for the Sunday paper. He wrote several books, including “The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn,” “The Port of Missing Ships,” “The History of Our Navy,” “The Story of the American Merchant Marine,” “The Story of the New England Whalers,” and “The History of the American Slave Trade.” He now lives in retirement near Little Falls, New York. His son, Raymond S. Spears, the fiction-writer, was a Sun reporter from 1896 to 1900.
Park Row knows Erasmus D. Beach chiefly through the book-reviews he wrote for the Sun during many years, but he was a first-class reporter, too. The Sun liked specialists, but no man could expect to stick to his specialty. When Gustav Kobbé went on the Sun in March, 1880, it was for the general purpose of assisting William M. Laffan in dramatic criticism and Francis C. Bowman in musical criticism; but his first assignment was to go to Bellevue Hospital and investigate the reported mistreatment of smallpox patients—a job which he accepted like the good soldier that every good Sun man is.