“I’d like to get the job of handling your paper here,” said a young fellow to a Pittsburgh newspaper man.
“You’ll have to get some newsman to do it anyhow, for your old men have gone down, and I and my partner are the only newsmen in Johnstown above ground.”
The newsdealing business is not the only one of which something like that is true.
HURRYING TO THE HILLS.
There has been great scarcity of cooking utensils since the flood. It not only is very inconvenient to the people, but tends to the waste of a great deal of food.
The soldiers are growling bitterly over their commissary department. They claim that bread and cheese and coffee is about all they get to eat.
The temporary electric lights have now been strung all along the railroad tracks and through the central part of the ruins, so that the place after dark is really quite brilliant seen from a distance, especially when to the electric display is added the red glow in the mist and smoke of huge bonfires.
Anybody who has been telegraphing to Johnstown this week and getting no answers would understand the reason for the lack of answers if he could see the piles of telegrams that are sent out here by train from Pittsburgh. Four thousand came in one batch on Thursday. Half of them are still undelivered, and yet there is probably no place in the country where the Western Union Company is doing better work than here. The flood destroyed not only the company’s offices, but the greater part of their wires, in this part of the country. The office they established here is in a little shanty with no windows and only one door, which doesn’t close, and it handles an amount of outgoing matter daily that would swamp nine-tenths of the city offices in the country. Incoming business is now received in considerable quantities, but for several days so great was the pressure of outgoing business that no attempt was made to receive any dispatches.
The whole effort of the office has been to handle press matter, and how well they done it is shown by the amount of matter received from there that the daily papers have been publishing every day. The rush of press matter has been slacking a little now, and in a day or two private messages will probably be going back and forth with reasonable promptness. But there will be no efficient delivery service for a long time. The old messenger boys are all drowned, and the other boys who might make messenger boys are also most of them drowned so that the raw material for creating a service is very scant. Besides that, nobody knows nowadays where anyone else lives, and it is almost impossible to deliver private messages at all.