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“Why, he can’t begin to work unless he’s had three or four drinks to limber him up,” Harry Dunlap once said to me. “He has to have six or seven more to get through till evening.” He did not say how many were required to carry him on until midnight, but I fancy he must have consumed at least a half dozen more. He was in a constant state of semi-intoxication, which was often skillfully concealed.

During my second month on the Globe McEnnis was made city editor in place of Sullivan, who had gone to a better paper. Later he was made managing editor. I learned from Maxwell that he was well known in Chicago newspaper circles for his wit, his trenchant editorial pen, and that once he had been considered the most brilliant newspaper editor in St. Louis. He had a small, spare, intellectual wife, very homely and very dowdy, who still adored him and had suffered God knows what to be permitted to live with him.

The first afternoon I saw him sitting in the city editorial chair I was very much afraid of him and of my future. He looked raucous and uncouth, and Maxwell had told me that new editors usually brought in new men. As it turned out, however, much to my astonishment, he took an almost immediate fancy to me which ripened into a kind of fatherly affection and even, if you will permit me humbly to state a fact, a kind of adoration. Indeed he swelled my head by the genial and hearty manner in which almost at once he took me under his guidance and furthered my career as rapidly as he could, the while he borrowed as much of my small salary as he could. Please do not think that I begrudged this then or that I do now. I owe him more than a dozen such salaries borrowed over a period of years could ever repay. My one grief is, that I had so little to give him in return for the very great deal he did for me.