Читать книгу A Book About Myself онлайн

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Picture a dreamy cub of twenty-one, long, spindling, a pair of gold-framed spectacles on his nose, his hair combed à la pompadour, a new spring suit consisting of light check trousers and bright blue coat and vest, a brown fedora hat, new yellow shoes, starting out to force his way into the newspaper world of Chicago. At that time, although I did not know it, Chicago was in the heyday of its newspaper prestige. Some of the nation’s most remarkable editors, publishers and newspaper writers were at work there: Melville E. Stone, afterward general manager of the Associated Press; Victor F. Lawson, publisher of the Daily News; Joseph Medill, editor and publisher of the Tribune; Eugene Field, managing editor of the Morning Record; William Penn Nixon, editor and publisher of the Inter-Ocean; George Ade; Finley Peter Dunne; Brand Whitlock; and a score of others subsequently to become well known.

Having made up my mind that I must be a newspaper man, I made straight for the various offices at noon and at six o’clock each day to ask if there was anything I could do. Very soon I succeeded in making my way into the presence of the various city and managing editors of all the papers in Chicago, with the result that they surveyed me with the cynical fishy eye peculiar to newspaper men and financiers and told me there was nothing.