CHESTER SANDERS LORD
In the southwest corner of the room was a double desk at which the city editor sat from 10 A.M. until 5 P.M., when the night city editor came in. Next to the city editor’s desk was the roll-top of the assistant city editor, also used by the assistant night city editor. Beyond that was the desk of the suburban or “Jersey” editor. Nearest the door, so that the noise of ten-thousand-dollar challenges to twenty-round combat would not disturb the whole room, was the desk of the sporting editor.
In the fifty years that have passed since Dana bought the Sun, the changes in the heads of the news departments have been comparatively few. True, the news office has not been as fortunate as the editorial rooms, where only three men, Charles A. Dana, Paul Dana, and Edward P. Mitchell, have been actual editors-in-chief; but the list of managing editors and night city editors is not long. Before the day of Chester S. Lord, the managing editors were, in order: Isaac W. England, Amos J. Cummings, William Young, and Ballard Smith. Since Lord’s retirement the managing editors have been James Luby, William Harris, and Keats Speed.
The city editors have been John Williams, Larry Kane, W. M. Rosebault, William Young, John B. Bogart (1873–1890), Daniel F. Kellogg (1890–1902), George B. Mallon (1902–1914), and Kenneth Lord, the present city editor, a son of Chester S. Lord.
The night city editors before the long reign of Selah Merrill Clarke—of whom more will be said presently—were Henry W. Odion, Elijah M. Rewey, and Ambrose W. Lyman, all of whom had previously been Sun reporters, and all of whom remained with the Sun, in various capacities, for many years. Rewey was the exchange editor from 1887 to 1903, and was variously employed at other important desk posts until his death in 1916. Since Mr. Clarke’s retirement, in 1912, the night city editors have been Joseph W. Bishop, J. W. Phoebus, Eugene Doane, Marion G. Scheitlin, and M. A. Rose.
The night editors of the Sun, whose function it is to make up the paper and to “sit in” when the managing editors are absent, have been Dr. John B. Wood, the “great American condenser”; Garret P. Serviss, now with the Evening Journal; Charles M. Fairbanks, Carr V. Van Anda (1893–1904), now managing editor of the New York Times; George M. Smith (1904–1912), the present managing editor of the Evening Sun; and Joseph W. Bishop.
In the eighties, the nineties, and the first decade of the present century the front corners of the city room were occupied, six nights a week, by two men closely identified with the Sun’s progress in getting and preparing news. These, Chester S. Lord and S. M. Clarke, were looked up to by Sun men, and by Park Row generally, as essential parts of the Sun.
Lord, through his city editors, reporters, and correspondents, got the news. If it was metropolitan news—and until the latter days of July, 1914, New York was the news-centre of the world, so far as American papers were concerned—Clarke helped to get it and then to present it after the unapproachably artistic manner of the Sun. In the years of Lord and Clarke more than a billion copies of the Sun went out containing news stories written by men whom Lord had hired and whose work had passed beneath the hand of Clarke.
Chester Sanders Lord, who was managing editor of the Sun from 1880 to 1913, was born in Romulus, New York, in 1850, the son of the Rev. Edward Lord, a Presbyterian clergyman who was chaplain of the One Hundred and Tenth Regiment of New York Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War. Chester Lord studied at Hamilton College in 1869 and 1870, and went from college to be associate editor of the Oswego Advertiser. In 1872 he came to the Sun as a reporter, and covered part of Horace Greeley’s campaign for the Presidency in that year. After nine months as a reporter he was assigned by the managing editor, Cummings, to the suburban desk, where he remained for four years.