“They’d all go.” It was plain that he was not boasting; he stated a simple fact.
9.30 A. M. “THE CENTURY” OFFICE NEWSBOY
Some kingdoms have rested on no better claim than the boss’s corner. There was one boss who took the title with the power, but neither lasted long. Jack Sullivan, “the King of the Newsboys,” lies in the Tombs at this writing, mired in the infamy that bred the Rosenthal murder. His was the choice of the gutter that is always handy to the street, but it was not typical. Neither is that of the newsboy, now grown to man’s size, who owns the route on which I live and counts me among his subjects. Knowing that I have become a farmer, he lingers whenever he finds me at home, to hear the news of potatoes and crops. He dreams of them, asleep and awake, and he has saved nearly enough to buy his farm, beside raising a family of little children. When he has it all, he will sell his route to another boy as young as he was when he began and, let us hope, as honorably ambitious. He is not typical because it is not often that the newsboy’s longing takes the shape of a farm, though I know of at least one, a graduate of one of the Children’s Aid Society’s lodging-houses, who did the same. He is a settlement worker now when he is not farming. Another, who came out of the same place, is superintendent of a boys’ club in a New Jersey town. And there is one, a cripple, of whom some of the readers of this article have doubtless bought papers, whose domain lies on the north side of Forty-second Street and yields him a revenue of five dollars a day, so they say in the Forty-fourth Street lodging-house in which he used to live, and which he now supplies with papers.
AN OLD-TIME SCENE IN NEW YORK
Boys are no longer permitted to board the street cars.
But the newsboy’s ambition is more apt to run to business or the professions. There are clergymen, lawyers, and bankers in New York who began their careers crying newspapers in the street. I know of a distinguished physician on Madison Avenue who so paid his way through college. At the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge one sells newspapers to-day who is in his last year in the medical school. Another, around in Fulton Street, will be graduated with the next class from the dental college, and up at the Grand Central I brush against one who is taking his second year’s course in the law school. All these are still at their posts, making the money that pays for their education; but I pass them all by, when bound up-town, and buy my paper or magazine of one who stands at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue. Let me tell you his story.
From his window across the street one of the officers of the Gerry Society saw a boy with a crutch and an armful of papers dive into the hurrying crowd on the crossing and snatch a customer from under the very nose of a big, bearded man, also a news-vender, who in revenge struck him an angry blow that sent him sprawling in the dirt. The boy picked himself up and limped back to his corner, where the officer found him brushing off his coat and attending to business as though nothing had happened.
“It is all right,” was Fred’s only comment; “I wasn’t hurt, and I guess it was his sale, anyhow.”