It is graduation day in the little brown schoolhouse on Baltimore
Street in Lynn, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. Miss Parrot is the
teacher--a dear! You are six years old; next month you will be seven.
The blackboard is covered with chalk drawings: sailboats, steamboats,
ferryboats, trains of cars, houses, people and animals. You are the
artist. Your mamma, with other mammas, is sitting on the platform,
proud of her Willie--who is probably plenty proud of himself.
Lynn is a shoe town. This is 1875. Most of the work is done by hand.
The employees are all natives--Universalists and Unitarians, probably.
Many women work at home, binding uppers and tongues of high, lace
shoes. You have a little express wagon. You carry finished work back to
the factories and return with a supply of unfinished. For each trip you
are paid five cents. With your savings you buy a printing press. It is
the kind you place on a table and slap with the palm of your hand. In
business offices it is used to stamp date lines. Your father is drawing
cartoons for a Lynn daily--perhaps the _Daily Item_. He brings you a
box of pi. When you succeed in finding a few letters of the same font
you file them to fit the type slot in the press.
Your father is ill, an aftermath of the Civil War. You have moved to
the section called Swampscott. This is too far away for you to attend
the school to which your class has gone. Your mother goes out every
day to do dress-making. A playmate takes you to his school. But most
of the time you remain at home with your father. He tells you he
hasn’t long to live, says you have been a good boy and that when you
grow up you will want to be an artist and there will be no money for
your education. He gives you much fine advice which you never forget.
Then he sends you out to play. You go to Fisherman’s Beach and watch
the fishermen take lobsters out of the boiling pot. They give you the
little ones the law forbids selling. You crack them on a rock, and have
a feast. Sunday mornings, or occasionally on a Saturday night, you go
to the baker’s and get your warm pot of baked beans and buy a loaf of
brown-bread--always an event of delicious anticipation. Between meals,
when you are hungry, there is often a cold cod-fish cake to be found in
the pantry.
Your mother and you are now alone in the world and you are on the
“Narrow Gauge” on your way to Boston. You are sucking a “picklelime,”
always found in glass jars at the candy counter of every railroad and
ferry waiting room. It will be made to last until you reach Boston and
are at the Park Street corner of the Common watching the Punch and Judy
show while your mother is shopping. At noon you sit in a booth and eat
clam chowder at a restaurant on Corn Hill. After the meal your mother
takes you to a wholesale house where she has a friend. Here you are
bought a suit of clothes.
“But isn’t it too big, Mamma?”
“Yes, dear; but children grow very fast and soon it will fit you--and
Mamma can’t afford to buy you a new suit every year.”
And now you are on your way to Northern Michigan, where your mother
has a sister whose husband is paymaster at the Lake Superior Iron
Mine. En route you stop at Providence where you are intrigued by the
teams of twenty or more horses that pull freight cars through the
downtown districts. You think it would be fine to be a teamster. At
Thompsonville, Connecticut, you go to school for a few weeks. On circus
day you are allowed to have a vacation. You ride a pony in the parade
and ask your mother if you can’t join the circus and ride in the
parades every day.
It is your first day in the little mining town of Ishpeming. You are
standing in the middle of the road watching children going home from
school; the girls giggle, the boys laugh at the new boy in a too-big
suit. One little girl has cute pigtails. You like her. You are now
quite grown up, nearly ten. At a Sunday-school picnic you tell the
little girl you are someday going back to Boston and learn to be an
artist. You ask her to wait for you. She promises. With this important
problem settled you can now give all of your attention to the question
of how you are to get an art education.
In the fall you go to school and somehow manage to pull through. Your
uncle and aunt go for a visit “back East.” Your mother keeps house for
your cousins. Every night when you go to bed you kneel down and ask
God to tell your uncle to bring you a printing press, the kind with
a lever, like the ones shown in the _Youth’s Companion_. Your uncle
brings you an Ingersoll dollar watch.
It is your second year in school. You now have a step-father. He is a
fine man and you like him and he likes you--but of course you can’t
expect him to pay for your art education. You are having trouble with
arithmetic--something in division. Teacher says, “Take your books and
go home, Willie, and remain until you have the correct answer.”
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!
You and a compositor now have control of the town bill posting. When
there are no theater or patent medicine ads to put up you cover the
boards with blank newsprint and letter and picture advertisements for
the stores.
You are sixteen, almost seventeen. A sheet of newsprint is tacked on
the printing-office wall and, using marking ink and a brush, you are
picturing and lettering a masquerade poster for the roller rink.
“Who is this young artist?”
The speaker is Frank Bromley, a well-known landscape painter from
Chicago.
You tell him about your father and that you are going back to Boston to
study art. He suggests your stopping off in Chicago to see him. Says he
can perhaps help you.
You are nearly seventeen and already you have saved more than fifty
dollars. By the early fall you have four twenty-dollar gold pieces
under your socks in the top till of your trunk. Wages are always paid
in gold and silver. You are now ready to start for Chicago. Two weeks
later you are on your way.
[Illustration]