All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography

by Ida M. Tarbell

It seems to me [wrote Dunne, editing our contributions] that we are serving up a savory Christmas number ... a nice present to be found in the bottom of a stocking....

You cannot go to the Patent Office in Washington and take out a patent that will transform men into angels. The way upward, long and tedious as it is, lies through the hearts of men. It has been so since the founding of the Feast. Nothing has been proved more clearly in the political history of the race than this, that good will to men has done more to improve government than laws and wars.

... Let us close down our desks for the year. If you want to find me for another week I will be found in the wonderful little toy shop around the corner.

That editorial broke the tension which had made me think this was no time to go home for Christmas. I went.

Peter Dunne hated the pains of writing. His labor affected the whole office—sympathy with what he was going through, fear that his copy would not be in on time, eagerness to see it when it came, to know if it was “one of his best.” But Peter’s work was never what he thought it ought to be, and he sought forgetfulness.

Indispensable on the new editorial staff, seeing Peter through his birth pains, keeping the rest of us at our tasks, nursing new writers, making up the magazine, was Albert Boyden. He had come fresh from Harvard to McClure’s and had at once made himself a place by his genius for keeping things going and his gift for sympathetic friendliness. It was a combination which became more valuable and irresistible as time went on. Bert was everybody’s friend, whether editor, artist, or writer. “One can have friends, one can have editors,” Ray Stannard Baker was to write later, “but Bert was both.”

He was of the greatest value to the American in bringing together writers and artists who were attaching themselves to the new magazine. Bert was so fond of us all that he could not endure the idea that we did not all know one another, and he made it his business to see that we had at least the opportunity. He lived on the south of Stuyvesant Square, four flights up. There was no one in all that circle of distinguished contributors who did not welcome the chance to climb those stairs to Bert’s dinners and teas. And what a group of people came! They are recorded in his guest book: Booth Tarkington, Edna Ferber, Stewart Edward White, his wife and his brother Gilbert, Julian and Ada Street, the Norrises, the Rices and Martins of Louisville, Joe Chase, Will Irwin, and a dozen more, along with visiting celebrities, politicians, scientists, adventurers. What talk went on in that high-up living room! What wonderful tales we heard!

Bert was so much younger than the rest of us, so full of enthusiasm and hope, so much more vital and all-shedding, that it is still to me incredible that he should have left this world so much earlier than I. He died in 1925, but he lives in a little book which J. S. P. edited in his memory. How proud Bert would have been of that! “There is nobody like J. S. P.,” he used to say. Many of his big circle of friends contributed their recollections of him. I have never known another person in my life for whom quite such a book could have been written.

In spite of the gay unity of our group, the vigor and steadiness with which it began and continued its operation, I had suffered a heavy shock. I know now I should not have taken it as well as I did (and inwardly that was nothing to boast of) if it had not been cushioned by an engrossing personal interest. I had started out to make a home for myself.

I had already made three major attempts to establish myself—first in Meadville, then in Paris, then in Washington—and all had failed. When in 1898 it became evident that if I were to remain on the McClure’s staff I must come to New York, I was in no mood to adopt a new home town. New York might be my writing headquarters, but Titusville should be home. Finally I would return there, I told myself. But Titusville was five hundred miles away. There were no airplanes in those days. The railroad journey was tedious and expensive, week-ending was impossible. I soon grew weary of the week-end makeshifts of a homeless person in a city. I wanted something of my own. And at last by a series of circumstances, purely fortuitous, I acquired forty acres and a little old house in Connecticut.