Those Times and These

by Irvin S. Cobb

You know the old saying: Home folks are always the last ones to appreciate us. More or less I think this must have been true of us as regards our own University's football outfit. Undoubtedly a lot had been written and said in cities farther south about it, before the Evening Press and the other papers in town began fully to realise that Midsylvania was putting the town on the football map. But when we did realise it we gave her and her team front page space and sporting page space, and plenty of both. Before we had been content to bestow upon her a weekly column which one of the undergraduates turned in at space rates, and pretty poor space rates at that—departmental stuff, mostly dealing with faculty changes, and Greek letter society doings and campus gossip and such-like. Now though almost anything that anybody on the staff or off of it chose to grind out about the boys who wore the M on their sweater breasts found a warm welcome after it landed on the City Editor's desk. Local pride in local achievement had been roused and if anybody knows of anything stronger than local pride in a city of approximately a hundred and fifty thousand population, please tell me what it is. We covered the games that were played at home that year as fully as the limitations of a somewhat scanty staff permitted, and Ike Webb was detailed to travel with the squad when it played away from home. He sent back by telegraph, regardless of expense, stories on the games abroad, which were smeared all over the sheet under spread heads and signed as being “By Our Special Staff Correspondent.” They were good stories—Ike was not addicted to writing bad ones, ever—and they made circulation.

There is no telling how many letters from subscribers came to the chief commending him for his journalistic enterprise. He ran a good many of them. The paper rode with the team on the crest of the popularity wave. Trust Devore for that. He had a sense for news-values which compensated and more than compensated for certain temperamental shortcomings as exhibited inside the plant.

One day in the tail end of November the old Major came stumping down the stairs from his sanctum—anyhow, he always called it his sanctum—upon the top floor in a little partitioned-off space adjoining the chief's office, where he had a desk of his own and where he did his work. He had a wad of copy paper in his hand. In dress and in manner he was the same old Major that he had been in the flush times two years back, when he used to come in daily, ostensibly to get some exchanges but really to sit and sit, and bore everybody who would listen with tiresome long accounts of things that happened between 1861 and 1865—not the shabby forlorn figure he became that first summer after he got his twelve-dollar-a-week job—but his former self, recreated all over again. His fullbreasted shirt of fine linen jutted out above the unbuttoned top of his low waistcoat in pleaty, white billows and his loose black sailor's tie made a big clump at his throat where the ends of his Lord Byron collar came together. His cuffs almost covered his hands and his longish white hair was like silk floss lying on his coat collar behind. That little white goatee of his jutted out under his lower lip like a tab of carded wool. Altogether he was the Major of yore, rejoicing sartorially in his present state of comparative prosperity. The boys around the shop always said that if the Major had only ten dollars and fifty cents in the world he would spend five dollars of it for his club dues and five of it on his wardrobe and give the remaining fifty cents to some beggar. I guess he would have, too.

He came downstairs this day and walked up to Devore, and laid down his sheaf of pages at Devore's elbow. “A special contribution, sir,” he said very ceremoniously.

Devore ran through the first page, which was covered with pencil marks—the Major always wrote his stuff out in long hand—and glanced up, a little bit astonished.

“Kind of out of your usual line, isn't it, Major Stone?” he asked.

“In a measure, sir—yes,” stated the old man; and he rocked on his high heels as though he might be nervous regarding the reception his contribution would have in this quarter. “Under the circumstances I feel justified in a departure from the material I customarily indite. But if you feel—”

“Oh, that's all right!” said Devore, divining what the Major meant to say before the Major finished saying it. “There's always room for good stuff.”

He laid the first sheet aside and shuffled through the sheets under it, picking out lines and appraising the full purport of the manuscript, as any skilled craftsman of a newspaper copy desk can do in half the length of time an outsider would be needing to make out the sense of it.

“About young Morehead, eh? I didn't know you knew him, Major?”