As Mr. Mason himself explains, he was never a lumber dealer, though he has tried to sell everything from hardware to hogs.
How, then, can he write lumber lyrics that hit such a responsive chord in every lumber dealer’s mind? The Lord knows. He was born that way. His prose rhymes “get under your hide” and under every other lumber dealer’s hide, because Walt Mason has an interest in you and your fellow human beings.
Walt Mason was born in Columbus, Ontario, May 4th, 1862. He was the fifth of six sons of poor parents. When Walt was four years old his father was accidentally killed. After his mother died, when he was fifteen, he went to Port Hope, Ontario, and worked in a hardware store for $2.50 a week, boarding himself. He soon forsook the hardware business, in 1880, and crossed Lake Ontario into New York State, where he hoed beans until he decided that there wasn’t any sense in hoeing beans.
“Arm in arm with the star of empire,” he took his course westward, stopping in Ohio and in Illinois, and then in St. Louis. There he wrote “some stuff” for a humorous weekly called The Hornet, which obtained for him a position at $5.00 per week doing everything from writing gems of thought to sweeping the floors.
When The Hornet went broke, Mason continued westward and worked for three years as a hired man in Kansas. He became disgusted with the work and managed to get a position with the Leavenworth Times. From there he floated to the Atchison Globe, and was off and on connected with newspapers in a dozen cities. At last, William Allen White, publisher of the Emporia Gazette, offered him a position.
The Gazette always printed on its first page an item of local interest with a border around it, called a “star head.” One day, the city editor was shy the necessary item and asked Walt to write something to fill the space. He wrote a little prose rhyme asking people to go to church next day, which was Sunday. The rhyme attracted attention, and on Monday he wrote another one, and a little later on, Walt and the “star head” became a feature of the Gazette. This was the origin of the prose poem and that was when Walt Mason came to himself—at the age of forty-five.
The rhymes of Walt Mason have had a marked influence on American literature. Their unusual character have made the “highbrows” wonder how to class them. His rhymes seem to be neither prose nor poetry, though it must be remembered that the poems of the classics were written in lineless form, and therefore, that Mason’s stuff can’t be condemned simply because it isn’t printed like verse.
Mason used to write for a great many house organs, but today Curtis Service, for which he has been writing since the third issue of the publication, in September, 1913, is one of the few on his list.
Walt Mason believes that poets are born and not made. At any rate, he says that they must have an ear for rhyme. The manner in which he sends in his contributions to Curtis Service shows that he doesn’t chew up many pencils paring down his rhymes and changing them about so that their feet will toe the mark.
Though he is a poet he has but one eccentricity: he is fat. He tried out a large number of eccentricities, because he knew all poets had to have some, but finally decided upon being fat as the one with fewest drawbacks and the least inconvenient.