Читать книгу A Book About Myself онлайн

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By degrees I came to know the trade and poor sections of the city. Here were long throbbing wholesale streets, crowded with successful companies; along the waterfront was a mill area backed up by wretched tenements, as poor and grimy and dingy as any I have ever seen; elsewhere were long streets of middle-class families, all alike, all with white stone doorsteps or windowsills and tiny front yards.

The atmosphere of the Globe-Democrat after a time came to have a peculiar appeal for me because it was dominated so completely by the robust personality of McCullagh. He was so natural, unaffected, rugged. As time passed he steadily grew in my estimation and by degrees, as I read his paper, his powerful, brilliant editorials, and saw how systematically and forcefully he managed all things in connection with himself and his men, the very air of St. Louis became redolent of him. He was a real force, a great man. So famous was he already that men came to St. Louis from the Southwest and elsewhere just to see him and his office. I often think of him in that small office, sitting waist-deep among his papers, his heavy head sunk on his pouter-like chest, his feet incased in white socks and low slipper-like shoes, his whole air one of complete mental and physical absorption in his work. A few years later he committed suicide, out of sheer weariness, I assume, tired of an inane world. Yet it was not until long after, when I was much better able to judge him and his achievements, that I understood what a really big thing he had done: built up a journal of national and even international significance in a region which, one would have supposed, could never have supported anything more than a mediocre panderer to trade interests. As Hazard had proudly informed me, the annual bill for telegraph news alone was $400,000: a sum which, in the light of subsequent journalistic achievements in America, may seem insignificant but which at that time meant a great deal. He seemed to have a desire to make the paper not only good (as that word is used in connection with newspapers) but great, and from my own memory and impression I can testify that it was both. It had catholicity and solidity in editorials and news. The whole of Europe, as well as America, was combed and reflected in order that his readers might be entertained and retained, and each day one could read news of curious as well as of scientific interest from all over the world. Its editorials were in the main wise and jovial, often beautifully written by McCullagh himself. Of assumed Republican tendencies, it was much more a party leader than follower, both in national and in State affairs. The rawest of raw youths, I barely sensed this at the time, and yet I felt something of the wonder and beauty of it all. I knew him to be a great man because I could feel it. There was something of dignity and force about all that was connected with him. Later it became a fact of some importance to me that I had been called to a paper of so much true worth, by a man so wise, so truly able.