“‘No, ma’am,’ answered the lad; ‘but they told me to tell you he was hurt in a fire and is in the hospital.’
“Jerry, my other boy, had opened the door for the lad, and was talking to him while I dressed a bit. And then I walked down-stairs and saw Jerry standing silent under the gaslight; and I said again, ‘Jerry, is Gene dead?’ And he said ‘Yes,’ and he went out.
“After a while I went down to the Oak Street Station myself, because I couldn’t wait for Jerry to come back. The policemen all stopped talking when I came in, and then one of them told me it was against the rules to show me Gene at that time; but I knew the policeman only thought I’d break down. I promised him I wouldn’t carry on, and he took me into a room to let me see Gene. It was Gene.”
The Sun has been richly fortunate in the humour that has tinged its news columns since its very beginning. Even Ben Day, with all the worries of a pioneer journalist, made the types exact a smile from his readers. With Dana, amusing the people was second only to instructing them. Julian Ralph and Wilbur Chamberlin both had the trick of putting together the bricks of fact with the mortar of humour. Chamberlin had several characters, like his Insec’ O’Connor, whose strings he pulled and made to dance. Hardly a sea-story of Sam Wood’s—except where there is tragedy—does not contain something to be laughed over. Samuel Hopkins Adams was an adept at the comic twist. Lindsay Denison once wrote a story of a semipublic celebration of an engagement so delightfully that the bride’s father, perhaps the only person in New York who did not see the humour of the affair, threatened to break the pledge of troth, although the groom was a public character who had courted publicity all his life.
Charles Selden, as grave a reporter as ever glowered at a poor space-bill, had a vein of structural humour perhaps unsurpassed by any reporter. His account of a press reception at the home of Miss Lillian Russell has been approached in delicacy only by O’Malley’s interview with Miss Laura Jean Libbey. Selden’s story of the occasion when creditors took away all the furniture of John L. Sullivan’s café—except the one chair upon which the champion snoozed—was a model of dry, unlaboured humour.
As an example of the drollness with which O’Malley has delighted Sun readers for ten years, take this extract from his report of the East Side Passover parade of 1917, referring to Counselor Levy, the Duke of Essex Street, whose title was conferred by the Sun twenty years ago:
It was difficult for a time to get the details of the duke’s Passover garb, owing to the fact that the interior of his Nile-green limousine has recently been fitted up with book-shelves, so that the duke can be surrounded with his law library even when motoring to and from his office on the East Side. Furthermore, every space not occupied by the duke and duchess and the law library yesterday was decorated with floral set pieces in honor of Easter, a large pillow of tuberoses inscribed with the words “Our Duke” in purple immortelles, and presented by the Essex Market Bar Association to their dean, being the outstanding piece among the interior floral decorations of the duke’s Rolls-Royce. Beside Ittchee, the duke’s Jap valet and chauffeur, was a large rubber-plant, which shut off the view, the rubber-plant being the Easter gift of Solomon, Solomon, Solomon, Solomon, Solomon and Solomon, who learned all their law as students in the offices of the duke.
Little or nothing remains to be told about the duke’s Easter scenery. He was dressed in the mode, that’s all—high hat, morning coat, trousers like Martin Littleton’s, mauve spats, corn-colored gloves, patent-leather shoes, Russian-red cravat, set off with a cameo showing the face of Lord Chief Justice Russell in high relief. His only distinctive mark was the absence of a gardenia on his lapel.
He was off then, waving his snakewood cane jauntily, while the East Side scrambled after the car to try to feel the Nile-green varnish. And with a final direction to Ittchee, “Go around by Chauncey Depew’s house on the way home, my good man,” the car exploded northward, and the Passover parade on Delancey Street officially ended for the day.
There is hardly a man who has lived five years as a Sun reporter but could write his own story of the Sun just as he has written stories of life. Here but a few of these men and their work have been touched. It has been a long parade from Wisner of 1833 to Hill of 1918. Many of the great reporters are dead, and of some of these it may be said that their lives were shortened by the very fever in which they won their glory. Some passed on to other fields of endeavour. Others are waiting to write “the best story ever printed in the Sun.”