Thomas M. Dieuaide, whose work for the Sun in the Spanish War has been referred to in this volume, and who became city editor of the Evening Sun, was one of Riis’s colleagues. Dieuaide was the author of the Evening Sun’s broadside against the black vice of the East Side. Printed in 1901, shortly before the beginning of a mayoralty campaign, it was a prime factor in the election of a reforming administration.
Richard Harding Davis was not the only fiction-writer to graduate from the Evening Sun’s school. Irvin S. Cobb got his start in the North as an Evening Sun reporter. He came to New York from Paducah, Kentucky, rented a hall room, and sat down and wrote to the managing editor of the Evening Sun a letter of application so humorous that he was employed immediately. His report of the peace conference at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, following the Russo-Japanese War, attracted wide attention. Stephen French Whitman and Algernon Blackwood, the novelists, were also Evening Sun men.
The Evening Sun’s list of former dramatic critics includes Acton Davies and Edward Fales Coward, both playwrights, and Charles B. Dillingham, the theatrical manager. Arthur Woods, recently police commissioner of New York, and Robert Adamson, recently fire commissioner, were old Evening Sun men. Frederick Palmer, Associated Press correspondent with the British forces in the great war, and Arthur Ruhl, a special correspondent at the front, are Evening Sun alumni.
In the early years of the Evening Sun the chief editorial writer was James T. Watkins, whom Mr. Laffan had known in California as a man of wide scholarship and an economic expert. He was so prolific that it was a common saying in the office that, with Watkins at his desk, the Evening Sun needed no other writers of editorial articles. Frank H. Simonds, who had been an editorial writer for the Sun since 1908, became chief editorial writer for the Evening Sun in 1913. In 1914 his war articles attracted wide attention. He was afterward editor of the Tribune.
Other writers for the editorial page were Edward H. Mullin, an Irishman from Dublin, and Frederic J. Gregg. The chief editorial writer is now James Luby, who is assisted by an Evening Sun veteran, Winfield S. Moody.
The managing editors since W. C. McCloy have been Charles P. Cooper, James Luby, and the present incumbent, George M. Smith, for many years night editor of the Sun, and its managing editor in the absence of Mr. Lord.
After Allan Kelly, the city editors were W. C. McCloy, Charles P. Cooper, Ervin Hawkins, Nelson Lloyd, and T. M. Dieuaide. Mr. Lloyd, who left the paper to write fiction, had served as city editor from 1897 to 1904.
The Evening Sun has always had a particular appeal to the woman reader. Its first woman reporter, Miss Helen Watterson, of Cleveland, Ohio, was induced to come East in Brisbane’s régime to write a column called “The Woman About Town,” and ever since 1890 the staff of women writers on the paper has been increasing. The Evening Sun has a page or two a day of feature articles written for women, by women, about women.
The financial and sports departments of the Evening Sun make it a man’s paper, too. No home-going broker would dare to board the subway without a copy of the Wall Street edition of the Evening Sun. A large staff of sporting writers, captained by Joseph Vila, provides each day a page or two of authoritative athletic news.
The Sun and the Evening Sun are run as separate publications, each with a complete staff, but their presses and purposes are one.