Mr. Beach was a clever all-round writer and reporter, with a leaning toward the purely literary side of the business, and he had no special fondness for sports; but the Sun sent him, with Christopher J. Fitzgerald and David Graham Phillips, to report the Yale-Princeton football-game at Eastern Park, Brooklyn, on Thanksgiving Day, 1890—that glorious day for Yale when the score in her favour was thirty-two to nothing. It was the time of Heffelfinger and Poe, McClung and King. Beach wrote an introduction which Mr. Dana classed as Homeric. Here is a bit of it:
Great in the annals of Yale forever must be the name of McClung. Twice within a few minutes this man has carried the ball over the Princeton goal-line. He runs like a deer, has the stability of footing of one of the pyramids, and is absolutely cool in the most frightfully exciting circumstances.
A curious figure is McClung. He has just finished a run of twenty yards, with all Princeton shoving against him. He is steaming like a pot of porridge, and chewing gum. His vigorously working profile is clearly outlined against the descending sun. How dirty he is! His paddings seem to have become loosed and to have accumulated over his knees. He has a shield, a sort of splint, bound upon his right shin. His long hair is held in a band, a linen fillet, the dirtiest ever worn.
He pants as a man who has run fifty miles—who has overthrown a house. He droops slightly for a moment’s rest, hands on knees, eyes shining with the glare of battle, the gum catching between his grinders. A tab on one of his ears signifies a severe injury to that organ, an injury received in some previous match from an opposition boot-heel, or from a slide over the rough earth with half a dozen of the enemy seated upon him. He has a little, sharp-featured face, squirrel-like, with a Roman nose and eyes set near together. Brief dental gleams illuminate his countenance in his moments of great joyfulness.
EDWARD G. RIGGS
Dana liked Beach’s introduction because the reader need not be a football fan to enjoy it. For the technique of the game he who wished to follow the plays could find all that he wanted in the stories of Fitzgerald and Phillips.
In connection with Beach’s literary accomplishments, there is a tradition that another famous Sun reporter of the eighties, Charles M. Fairbanks, was assigned to report one of the great games at Princeton, and, although entirely unacquainted with punts and tackles, came back with a story complete in technical detail, having learned the fine points of football in a few hours. Later, in the early nineties, Fairbanks was night editor of the paper.
A Sun man who has been a Sun man from a time to which the memory of man goeth back only with a long pull, is Samuel A. Wood, who has been the Sun’s ship-news man for more than thirty-five years. He is a good example, too, of the Sun man’s anonymity, for although he was the originator of the rhymed news story and his little run-in lyrics have been the admiration of American newspapermen for more than a generation, few persons beyond Park Row have known Wood as the author of them.
Although a first-class general reporter, Wood has stuck closely to his favourite topics, the ships and the weather. He made weather news bearable with such bits as this: