On another occasion he made a notable trip to the gate at the entrance to the big room. A drunken visitor was making the place ring with yells, and the office-boys could not stop him. Clarke bore the noise for ten minutes, and then, remarking, “This is unendurable!” went and threw the man down the stairs.
Clarke was the hero of a dozen newspaper stories, which he scorned to read.
“Do you know, Mr. Clarke,” said a reporter who did not know how shy “the boss” was, “that Blank has put you into a short story in Space’s Magazine?”
“Who is Blank?” said Clarke shortly.
“Why,” said his informant, “he worked here for several weeks.”
“Oh, Lord!” said Clarke. “I can’t be expected, can I, to remember all the geniuses that come and go?”
There was a mild ferocity about him that caused more than one cub to think that the night boss was unfriendly, but this attitude had a good effect. No young reporter ever made the same mistake twice.
“If you mean ‘child,’ write it so,” he would say. “Don’t write it ‘tot.’ And please have more variety in your motor cars. I have seen several that were not large and red and high-powered.”
The head-lines of the Sun have been well written since the first days of Dana, and Clarke, for thirty years, was the best of the head-line writers. He wrote rhyming heads for Sam Wood’s prose verse, satirical heads for satires, humorous heads for the funny men’s articles. A Sun reader could gauge almost exactly the worth of an article by the quality of the heading. A Sun reporter could tell just what Clarke thought of his story by the cleverness of the lines that the night city editor wrote above it.
Clarke would put the obvious heading on a long, matter-of-fact yarn in two minutes, but he might spend half an hour—if he had it to spare—polishing a head for a short and sparkling piece of work. Two architects who did city work pleaded poverty, but admitted having turned over property to their wives. Clarke headed the story: