However, the cases I had t o deal with were really mild — mild indeed to the one which threatened to do mayhem, or worse, to the whole office force, when I was printer on T. J. Wolfley’s Spectator. A doctor who had come down from Granada and located in Wetmore, sent word that he was going to pay us a visit at 10 o’clock of a Saturday morning for the express purpose of cleaning out the whole office. The offending item was a week old, and the demanded retraction in Friday’s paper had, as viewed by the Doctor, added “insult to injury.”
Theodore Wolf ley really enjoyed a scrap—and managed to have something on tap nearly all the time. He represented one faction of the local Republicans, and Moulton DeForest, when not a pronounced Prohibitionist, essayed to control another faction. The Doctor, a husky farm-bred boy in the Granada neighborhood, now on honored citizen of Wetmore, was a rantankerous Republican allied with the De-Forest faction—until he switched to the Populist party without losing any part of his rantankerous attributes.
Anticipating in advance the proposed call from the Doctor, Wolfley procured a revolver, and he and I practiced shooting the thing in the office, from a distance of ten feet, with target pinned on the leg of the imposing stone. He never hit the target once, but he broke a window pane all of two feet above the stone. He always shut his eyes and flinched before pulling the trigger.
I was supposed to be stationed at the imposing stone, in pretense of performing my regular duties, with iron side-stick—a lethal weapon when expertly wielded—in readiness for my part of the defense, if, and when, the Doctor might extend his belligerence thus far.
The printing office at that time was over the old Morris store on the north side of the main street. A stairway went up on the outside, with turnback to the front porch above. At the appointed hour, heavy feet pounded on the stairs. I had all of one minute in which to visualize my precarious position. With each step on the stairs my nervousness mounted. The irate intruder would of necessity be stationed somewhere between the editor and his foreman. The thing that worried me was my boss’ unpredictable marksmanship.
But it was not the Doctor’s heavy feet on the stairway. He had sent his understudy, Joe Eyman, who also was a husky bigfooted farm-bred boy from up in the Granada neighborhood. Joe fixed matters so that the Doctor and the Editor could talk it out between themselves. And in good time Joe became eligible to write MD after his own name. He then married Hattie Smarr, and they went to Sundance, Wyoming, to hang out his shingle. She was known in later years, in Wetmore, as Mrs. Stalder.
I am not sure if the belligerent Doctor’s grievance was professional or political. Probably the latter—but I do know that he was touchy in a professional way, for he later accounted for one-third of my unfavorable experience with doctors, as earlier mentioned in this writing. His successor in the Granada field had sent in by our Granada correspondent, a dollar’s worth of advertising, in the form of a personal, which had piqued the Old Doctor, causing him to do a bit of rantankerous snorting at me. But I did not rush out and buy a gun. I used the weapon I already had. The paper ignored him—and that whipped him into line in about one year. And he was ever after that my friend—with full ‘appreciation of the silent power of the press. He was a good doctor, and a good fellow—when he was good.
As Populist crusader, the Doctor was a success. His advertised meetings drew big crowds. He always brought in a principal speaker. One time he had two billed for the same night—”Sockless” Jerry Simpson and “Peruna” Jerry Botkin—but he got Mary Ellen Lease, instead. The Doctor and his two very fine little girls, Bertha and Belle, led the singing. The Doctor himself was not a noted vocalist—but he bore down heavily on the refrain of his favorite Populist song, “Turn The Rascals Out.”
Also, let me add that any time the editor of a local paper lets the politicians handle him, he is going to be woefully out of luck. Politics was dirty then. If an editor was a Republican, he was expected to engage in mud-slinging, shying the muck at all and sundry Democrats, regardless of their standing as citizens. The mere favorable mention of Republican candidates was not enough. And if he were true blue, he must keep up a barrage against editors of Democratic papers, and vice versa, a sort of nonsensical exchange of blasts. I steadfastly refused to be drawn into their political scraps. They called me a “mugwump.” But Gov. E. N. Morrell said—put it in writing—that inasmuch as I had succeeded in keeping my political skirts clean that I was a high-minded Republican. My hardest task was to hold down a brilliant and goshawful sarcastic local politician who wanted to engage in muck-raking, over the assumed name “Samantha” in my paper.
Politics was something to be shunned by me—that is, from a business standpoint in connection with the publication of the newspaper. I once went over to Edgerton, in the Missouri hills beyond Rushville, to investigate an offer of $1,000 bonus for the establishment of a newspaper. I struck the town at a time when a teachers’ convention was being held there. The banker, who was on the committee welcoming the teachers, was also on the committee pulling for the paper, and he had arranged the appointment with me. Mistaking me for a professor, he gave me a hearty handshake, and welcomed me along with the teachers getting off the same train. When I got up town, I called at his bank—and was “welcomed” again.