I had also the good fortune to secure the services of some reporters and some editorial assistants whose energies and capacities were of the utmost value to me.
Many of them are dead now—as, alas! most other persons are with whom I have been closely associated. But those of them who are living have made place and reputation for themselves in a way that justifies the pride I used to feel in their abilities, their energies, and their conscientious devotion to duty when they worked with me. Indeed, as I contemplate the careers of these men, most of whom came to me as "cubs" fresh from college, I am disposed to plume myself not only upon my sagacity in discovering their untried abilities, but also upon the tutelage I gave them in journalism. The eagerness with which other newspapers have since sought them out for important employments, and the rapidity of their promotion on those other newspapers have always been a source of pride to me—pride which is not, I think, vainglorious or unduly personal.
Perhaps the reader will permit me here to pay tribute to those loyal men who so willingly stood by me when the most that I was permitted to pay them was less than one-half—sometimes less than one-third what they might have earned upon other newspapers.
Some of My Brilliant "Cubs"
Among them was Charles E. Russell, who has since earned high literary place for himself. Another was Timothy Shaler Williams, who has since been lured from literature, for which his gifts were great, to affairs, and who for many years has been president of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company. I had Earl D. Berry for my managing editor, and I could have had none more capable. In the news department were De François Folsom—dead long years ago—Edward Fales Coward, who has since made a distinguished place for himself; Hewitt, the author of Dixey's song, "So English, You Know"; Sidney Strother Logan, one of the shrewdest news explorers I have ever known,—dead years ago, unfortunately,—and George B. Mallon, who came to me fresh from college and whose work was so good as to confirm my conviction that even in a newspaper's reporting room an educated mind has advantages over mere native shrewdness and an acquaintance with the slang and patter of the time. Mr. Mallon's work was so good, indeed, that I personally assigned him to tasks of peculiar difficulty. The New York Sun has since confirmed my judgment of his ability by making him its city editor, a post that he has held for seven years or more.
Another of my "cubs" was Henry Armstrong, whose abilities have since won for him a place on the brilliant editorial writing staff of the Sun. Still another was Henry Wright, who is now editor-in-chief of the paper on which he "learned his trade,"—though the paper has since changed its name to the Globe. Another was Nelson Hirsh, who afterwards became editor of the Sunday World.
On my editorial staff were Henry R. Elliot—dead now,—James Davis, who carried every detail of a singularly varied scholarship at his finger-tips, ready for instant use, and whose grace as a writer, illuminated as it was by an exquisitely subtle humor, ought to have made him famous, and would have done so, if death had not come to him too soon.
Doubtless there were others whom I ought to mention here in grateful remembrance, but the incessant activities of the score and more of years that have elapsed since my association with them ended have obliterated many details from my memory. Let me say that to all of them I render thanks for loyal and highly intelligent assistance in the difficult task I then had to wrestle with.
With a staff like that we were able to get the news and print it, and we did both in a way that attracted attention in other newspaper offices as well as among newspaper readers. With such writers as those mentioned and others, the editorial utterances of the paper attracted an attention that had never before been accorded to them.
So far as its books of account gave indication, the Commercial Advertiser had never earned or paid a dividend. At the end of the first year under this new régime it paid a dividend of fifty per cent. At the end of its second year it paid its stockholders one hundred per cent. The earnings of the third year were wisely expended in the purchase of new presses and machinery. Before the end of the fourth year I had resigned its editorship to become an editorial writer on The World.