It is considered advisable by the historian at this time to say a word
regarding Dr. Franklin, our fellow-townsman, and a journalist who was
the Charles A. Dana of his time. Franklin's memory will remain green
when the names of millionaires of to-day are forgotten.
But let us proceed to more fully work out the life and labors of this
remarkable man.
Benjamin Franklin, formerly of Boston, came very near being an only
child. If seventeen children had not come to bless the home of
Benjamin's parents, they would have been childless. Think of getting
up in the morning and picking out your shoes and stockings from among
seventeen pairs of them!
And yet Benjamin Franklin never murmured or repined. He decided to go
to sea, and to avoid this he was apprenticed to his brother James, who
was a printer.
His paper was called the New England Courant. It was edited jointly by
James and Benjamin Franklin, and was started to supply a long-felt
want.
Benjamin edited it a part of the time, and James a part of the time.
The idea of having two editors was not for the purpose of giving
volume to the editorial page, but it was necessary for one to run the
paper while the other was in jail.
In those days you could not sass the king, and then, when the king
came in the office the next day and stopped his paper and took out his
ad, put it off on 'our informant' and go right along with the paper.
You had to go to jail, while your subscribers wondered why their paper
did not come, and the paste soured in the tin dippers in the sanctum,
and the circus passed by on the other side.
How many of us today, fellow-journalists, would be willing to stay in
jail while the lawn festival and the kangaroo came and went? Who of
all our company would go to a prison-cell for the cause of freedom
while a double-column ad of sixteen aggregated circuses, and eleven
congresses of ferocious beasts, fierce and fragrant from their native
lair, went by us?
At the age of seventeen Ben got disgusted with his brother, and went
to Philadelphia and New York, where he got a chance to 'sub' for a few
weeks and then got a regular job.
Franklin was a good printer and finally got to be a foreman. He made
an excellent foreman. He knew just how to conduct himself as a foreman
so that strangers would think he owned the paper.
In 1730, at the age of twenty-four, Franklin married, and established
the Pennsylvania Gazette. He was then regarded as a great man, and
almost every one took his paper.
Franklin grew to be a great journalist, and spelled hard words with
great fluency. He never tried to be a humorist in any of his newspaper
work, and everybody respected him.
Along about 1746 he began to study the habits and construction of
lightning, and inserted a local in his paper in which he said that he
would be obliged to any of his readers who might notice any new odd
specimens of lightning, if they would send them to the Gazette office
for examination.
Every time there was a thunderstorm Frank would tell the foreman to
edit the paper, and, armed with a string and an old doorkey, he would
go out on the hills and get enough lightning for a mess.
In 1753 Franklin was made postmaster of the colonies. He made a good
Postmaster-General, and people say there were fewer mistakes in
distributing their mail then than there have ever been since. If a man
mailed a letter in those days, Ben Franklin saw that it went to where
it was addressed.
Franklin frequently went over to England in those days, partly on
business and partly to shock the king. He liked to go to the castle
with his breeches tucked in his boots, figuratively speaking, and
attract a great deal of attention. Franklin never put on any frills,
but he was not afraid of crowned heads.
He did his best to prevent the Revolutionary War, but he couldn't do
it. Patrick Henry had said that war was inevitable, and had given it
permission to come, and it came.
He also went to Paris, and got acquainted with a few crowned heads
there. They thought a good deal of him in Paris, and offered him a
corner lot if he would build there and start a paper. They also
offered him the county printing; but he said, no, he would have to go
back to America or his wife might get uneasy about him. Franklin wrote
'Poor Richard's Almanac' in 1732 to 1757, and it was republished in
England.
Dr. Franklin entered Philadelphia eating a loaf of bread and carrying
a loaf under each arm, passing beneath the window of the girl whom he
afterward gave his hand in marriage.