You don’t like arithmetic, anyway.
“Mother,” you ask, “may I go to work and earn money so I can learn to be an artist?”
Your mother is troubled. Finally she says, “Perhaps it will be for the best.”
You go to the office of the Iron Agitator, that later became Iron Ore. George A. Newett is the owner and editor. This is the George A. Newett and the newspaper that were later sued for libel by Theodore Roosevelt. The trial took place in Marquette, Michigan, and Mr. Roosevelt won a verdict of six cents.
You are put to work washing-up a Gordon press. Then you receive your first lesson in feeding. There is power, a small engine mounted on an upright boiler, for the newspaper press. The two jobbers are kicked. Having half an hour of leisure you learn the lay of a lower-case beside the window—where you can proudly wave to the schoolchildren as they are going home to their noon meal. You are now a working man—wages three dollars a week.
Country newspaper shops train and use local help for straight matter. For job work, ads and presswork they depend upon itinerant job printers, who seldom remain as long as six months in any one town. When the Iron Ore job printer leaves you are sorry. He has been a kind and patient teacher. You are now twelve. Mr. Newett employs a new devil and you set jobs, advertising display, make up the paper and are responsible for all presswork. Your wages are increased to six dollars a week. When the motor power fails, as it does frequently, you go out on the street and employ off-shift miners to operate the press by means of a crank attached to the flywheel.
At this early date the print shop is above a saloon and in one corner of a big barn of a room that had been a lodge hall. In winter it is heated (?) with one stove. You go to work at seven and quit at six. The outside temperature is below zero. You and your devil forage in the snowdrifts of the alley back of the building and “borrow” packing boxes to get kindling for the stove and boiler.
The Peninsula Record, across the street, is a four-page tabloid. It is printed one page at a time on a large Gordon. The owner and editor is John D. West. He offers you eight dollars a week. You are not that important to Mr. Newett—and the extra two dollars will enable you to begin saving after paying board and buying your clothes.
In a few months Iron Ore moves into a new store-building. You are now thirteen and Mr. Newett offers you ten dollars a week and the acknowledged position of job printer. At fourteen this wage is increased to twelve. At fifteen you are spoken of as foreman and are receiving fifteen dollars a week—in ’85 a man’s wages.
This is the early Eighties. Small towns such as Ishpeming are “easy pickings” for traveling fakers. Their advance is always heralded by the exchanges. They clean up at the expense of local merchants. All editors warn them to keep away. Iron Ore print shop is on the ground floor. The editor’s sanctum is at the front. His desk is at the big window. It is nearly nine o’clock on a Friday night—“make-up” time. Mr. Newett has written his last sheets of copy and is reading proof. At the corner of Main and Division, diagonally across from the office, a faker is selling soap. In one wrapper he pretends to place a five dollar bill—a version of the “old army game.” He is standing in a market wagon and has a companion who strums a guitar and sings. Attached to an upright and above his head is a kerosene flare. Mr. Newett walks leisurely to where there are several guns and fishing rods in a corner. He is an inveterate sportsman in a land where game, deer and fish, is plentiful. Selecting a rifle he walks to the door and casually puts a bullet through the kerosene tank, then returns to his proof reading. Thoroughly likable, this pioneer editor—a fine boss, a true friend!