It was during this same golden age that an overgrown and diffident young man came from an obscure town in Illinois and was given a tryout on the Tribune. He was steady and industrious and ever willing, and they set him to do hotel reporting. He was a failure as a hotel reporter, because the young men employed by the Herald and Times secured interviews every day with interesting visitors whom he was never able to find. He could not find them because those interesting persons did not exist. They were created by the enterprising young men of the Times and Herald who were working in combination against the Tribune.
Each morning the Herald and Times would have a throbbing story told by some traveler who had shot big game in India, or penetrated the frozen north, or visited the interior of Tibet, or observed the habits of the kangaroo in Australia.
The visitor who told the wondrous tales of adventure invariably left in the afternoon for New York, but his name was on the hotel register as a corroborative detail intended to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. Perhaps I should explain that the hotel clerk was a party to the conspiracy.
Every day the Tribune young man was rebuked because he had been scooped by the Times and the Herald. He ran from hotel to hotel, frantically eager to do his duty, but he never could find the African explorer and the titled European and the North Sea adventurer who told their breathless tales day after day in the columns of the rival papers. So the Tribune young man was taken off hotels and put on finance. After that he was not scooped. He came to know Lyman J. Gage and moved on to New York via Washington. To-day the poor young man who failed as a hotel reporter because he lacked the gift of imaginative fiction is president of the National City Bank of New York. Perhaps you have heard of him. His name is Frank Vanderlip.
Now let us inquire as to the designing scribblers who caused him to lose his job. The Times man is here in New York as first aid to the tired business man. The next time you visit "Chin Chin" or the Hippodrome you will notice the name of Charles B. Dillingham on the program. As for the Herald young man, you must know something about him if you have read Mr. Dooley.
It was about 1890 that the sprightly organization known as the Whitechapel Club came into existence in Chicago. Moses P. Handy was an adopted son of the same period. He had come on from Philadelphia and was trying to introduce the custom of wearing evening clothes in the evening. Chicago had started to build the Columbian Exposition and was trying hard to prove that a provincial city could be cosmopolitan while company was present. Thus many influences worked together to make Chicago a rather interesting preparatory school in 1890.
If you will go over the list of young men who wrote for Chicago newspapers twenty-five years ago you will be convinced that the newspaper business is the greatest business in the world for getting out of. Let us here resolve to treat the reporter kindly, because in a few years we may be working for him.
Of all that untried host standing in line to receive assignments, I don't suppose any one man was a greater disappointment to prophets than Brand Whitlock. When he came up from a freshwater college in Ohio and quietly attached himself to the Herald staff he attracted attention almost immediately as a humorist. He specialized on "Josh stuff." He wrote bantering, fantastic, mock-serious stories of the kind that were standardized by Mr. Dana's young men. He was a star reporter, pulling down his thirty-five per; but any first-class horoscoper would have allowed that Whitlock was destined to contribute to Puck and Judge, and probably attempt the libretto of a comic opera. He legged it on the newspaper for a while and then re-deserted, the same as most of the others, and went to Springfield to resume his studies. This was his first erratic move. If he had been a true journalist there wouldn't have been anything more for him to learn. Then he published The Thirteenth District. Many of his old friends bought it expecting to get something on the order of refined vaudeville, but found, instead, a true and tragic story of cheap ambitions. Well, we watched him as mayor of Toledo, and we have been telling everybody for the last year and a half that we did assignments together and are members of the same college fraternity and wouldn't be afraid to go right up and speak to him anywhere.
To that scattered colony of twenty-five years ago I bring the assurance that we are proud of Brand Whitlock and are glad to call him our friend.
2. Brand Whitlock, American minister to Belgium, was the principal guest at a private banquet given by the Lotos Club at its home, 110 West Fifty-seventh Street, last night. It was described by a prominent member of the club as a "banquet that was not attended by any man prominent in politics, but one that was intended to do honor to Mr. Whitlock and to drink a little wine and to eat a little breast of guinea."