The Detroit Weekly Free Press is a famous American newspaper. For a
decade it has amused and instructed a hundred thousand families in
the United States and Canada, yet prior to 1870 the paper was almost
unknown outside the limits of the City of the Straits. The humorous
column of the Free Press and the witty descriptive articles printed
over the signature of “M. Quad,” explains the secret of the success of
this popular Detroit newspaper.
Charles B. Lewis, who is the proprietor of that typographical _nom
de plume_ “M. Quad,” began writing for the Free Press as far back as
1870, and since that time the success of the paper has been almost
phenomenal. The Detroit Free Press has not only attained an immense
circulation in this country, but has carried its success across the
Atlantic, where in the great English metropolis a weekly edition of the
Detroit Free Press is issued for the amusement and gratification of all
English-reading Europe.
The life of M. Quad has been a most romantic one, and if properly told
would fill a volume. He is now over fifty years of age, and is a native
of East Liverpool, Ohio. At the early age of fourteen, Lewis became
“printers’ devil” in the office of the Lansing (Michigan) Journal. At
the breaking out of the war he enlisted in a Michigan regiment and
served both in cavalry and infantry, winning many laurels on the field
of battle. After the war he went West and tried Indian fighting for a
time. Winning a lieutenantcy he retired and entered journalism. In 1868
he came near being killed by being blown up on the steamer Magnolia, on
the Ohio river. When he came down he was dragged out on the shore by
an old woman, who laid him out unconscious, among the dead and wounded
on the beach. He was taken for a dead negro and was carted away to the
morgue for burial.
He revived after a time, his wounds were dressed and he recovered in
a few days. Afterwards he wrote a humorous account of the explosion,
which was in a vein so irresistibly funny that it started him on the
road to fame. In 1870 he finally settled down as a humorous writer on
the Detroit Free Press, with which journal he has been connected ever
since.
Lewis published Goaks and Tears in 1875, which he prefaced by a
“a brief biography of M. Quad, the Free Press man, written by his
mother-in-law.” In this production he says of himself: