My good opinion of the editors had steadily declined; for it seemed to me
that they might have found something better to fill up with than my
literature. I had found a letter in the post office as I came home from
the hill side, and finally I opened it. Eureka! [I never did know what
Eureka meant, but it seems to be as proper a word to heave in as any when
no other that sounds pretty offers.] It was a deliberate offer to me of
Twenty-Five Dollars a week to come up to Virginia and be city editor of
the Enterprise.
I would have challenged the publisher in the “blind lead” days–I wanted
to fall down and worship him, now. Twenty-Five Dollars a week–it looked
like bloated luxury–a fortune a sinful and lavish waste of money.
But my transports cooled when I thought of my inexperience and consequent
unfitness for the position–and straightway, on top of this, my long
array of failures rose up before me. Yet if I refused this place I must
presently become dependent upon somebody for my bread, a thing
necessarily distasteful to a man who had never experienced such a
humiliation since he was thirteen years old. Not much to be proud of,
since it is so common–but then it was all I had to be proud of. So I
was scared into being a city editor. I would have declined, otherwise.
Necessity is the mother of “taking chances.” I do not doubt that if, at
that time, I had been offered a salary to translate the Talmud from the
original Hebrew, I would have accepted–albeit with diffidence and some
misgivings–and thrown as much variety into it as I could for the money.
I went up to Virginia and entered upon my new vocation. I was a rusty
looking city editor, I am free to confess–coatless, slouch hat, blue
woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops, whiskered half down to
the waist, and the universal navy revolver slung to my belt. But I
secured a more Christian costume and discarded the revolver.
I had never had occasion to kill anybody, nor ever felt a desire to do
so, but had worn the thing in deference to popular sentiment, and in
order that I might not, by its absence, be offensively conspicuous, and a
subject of remark. But the other editors, and all the printers, carried
revolvers. I asked the chief editor and proprietor (Mr. Goodman, I will
call him, since it describes him as well as any name could do) for some
instructions with regard to my duties, and he told me to go all over town
and ask all sorts of people all sorts of questions, make notes of the
information gained, and write them out for publication. And he added:
“Never say ‘We learn’ so-and-so, or ‘It is reported, or ‘It is rumored,’
or ‘We understand’ so-and-so, but go to headquarters and get the absolute
facts, and then speak out and say ‘It is so-and-so.” Otherwise, people
will not put confidence in your news. Unassailable certainly is the
thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most valuable reputation.”
It was the whole thing in a nut-shell; and to this day when I find a
reporter commencing his article with “We understand,” I gather a
suspicion that he has not taken as much pains to inform himself as he
ought to have done. I moralize well, but I did not always practise well
when I was a city editor; I let fancy get the upper hand of fact too
often when there was a dearth of news. I can never forget my first day’s
experience as a reporter. I wandered about town questioning everybody,
boring everybody, and finding out that nobody knew anything. At the end
of five hours my notebook was still barren. I spoke to Mr. Goodman. He
said:
“Dan used to make a good thing out of the hay wagons in a dry time when
there were no fires or inquests. Are there no hay wagons in from the
Truckee? If there are, you might speak of the renewed activity and all
that sort of thing, in the hay business, you know.