And Watt R. Melon is the chap
Who, by schemes of his own makin’,
Secured for me the stand-in with
My darling Belle A. Aiken.
—Xela Lemah.
As against Ecky’s classic eight lines, my own most widely copied writing consisted of only nine simple little words—words well put together, timely, and not wholly my own: “It once rained for forty days and forty nights.” It was a prolonged rainy spring, with farmers kept out of their fields so long as to cause much uneasiness. West E. Wilkenson, of the Seneca Courier, pronounced these nine words the best piece of writing coming from any of his contemporaries in many a day.
Brevity—saying a lot in few words—did it.
I do not mean to brag about this, for the item was largely a quotation, as any good Bible student would know. If I really wanted to brag, I would tell about the four times in one year my writings in the Spectator were selected and reprinted in Arthur Capper’s Topeka Daily Capital—maybe it was J. K. Hudson’s Daily then—as the best article of the week appearing in any of the four hundred newspapers in Kansas. Selecting and reprinting a best article was a weekly feature of the Capital for one year.
I “crowed” a little about it then, and P. L. Burlingame, a school teacher—principal of the Wetmore schools in the late 80’s and lawyer thereafter in partnership with his brother-in-law, M. DeForest, in offices across the hall from the Spectator office—said that I should have been content to let the other fellow “toot my horn.” But the Capital’s readers were not my readers—and I figured nothing was too good for the home folks. Always I write for the home folks.
Alex Hamel’s stories were more academically put together than anything I could write. Ecky was a school teacher. Also he was my very good friend. And it would be ungrateful of me not to acknowledge his able assistance — though his technique was rather too highbrow for my background, and I had to reject many of his literary buildups. Ecky’s writings were clothed in rhetoric and spiced with learned quotations, while I had to get along with bare limpy grammar. But then, in newspaper writing, it is not always academic learning that counts. However, it doesn’t hurt any—if one does not try to make it the whole show.