THE CUB REPORTER
Fortune and Boss Russell favored Jeff Thatcher. When he appeared at
half past ten that night in the _Freeman_ office the city editor was
in a quandary over the illness of two members of his staff and the
resignation of a third, and when he peered over his glasses at Jeff
Thatcher as he stood in front of his desk, he realized that here was
part of the solution to the unpleasant situation of finding himself
short-handed.
“You are young,” he told Jeff, “but your school stuff has been mighty
good for a beginner, and I’ll take you on as a cub, if you want to take
Mulvaney’s place. I’ve moved Mull up as special assignment man and you
can run his obits and cover the hospitals for accident cases.” And so
Jeff became a member of the _Freeman_ staff with surprising quickness.
Indeed, he started out forthwith to make what was to be his nightly
rounds of undertaking establishments and hospitals even at that late
hour, and at first he took a keen delight in the work.
There was no such thing as an assignment book in the office of the New
City _Daily Freeman_. That method was far too slow for city editor,
Boss Russell. He preferred to give out assignments over the city desk
just as fast as they developed. He would hand them over with a few
penciled notes, or a newspaper clipping or so, and some terse, snappy
instructions that usually were enough to inspire any one of his staff
of reporters to write the best story of his career. If he did not he
stood a good chance of being fired. Boss Russell wanted the best that
was in a man all the time. And he usually got it.
Jeff Thatcher watched this nightly distribution of assignments for
two weeks. He watched it at first eagerly, hopefully speculating
on what his would be. But as nights went on he watched it none the
less eagerly, but far from hopeful. He soon grew to know what his
assignments would be. Boss Russell had a method all his own of breaking
in cub reporters. Jeff began to realize that it was a method that
treated said cub as if he were a machine. He had already begun to feel
like the cogs in a watch or the gears in an automobile. Life became a
constant succession of visits to certain undertaking establishments
for obituaries of the people who had died that day, a nightly trip to
police headquarters to copy the unimportant police slips of accidents,
a visit to the Memorial Hospital, after which he would return to the
_Freeman_ office, there to sit down in front of a typewriter and
laboriously grind out paragraph after paragraph of names, dates and
ages of people who had been injured and who had died during the past
twenty-four hours. Jeff began to feel like a dead one himself.
Night after night he watched the line of reporters file by Boss
Russell’s desk to get their assignment and fare forth on some
interesting news quest, but always when he, usually last, arrived at
the desk, the city editor would wearily pass over to him a cryptic
note “undertakers, headquarters, Memorial Hospital, Jones wedding,”
or perhaps the last would be varied with such notations as “see Dr.
Bisbee on Brinkerhoff accident,” or “Look in at Æolian Hall, Plumber’s
Association dance.” It was always the same. Jeff had come to the
conclusion that he never would get a real news story to write. He
wondered why cleaning streets or delivering milk would not be just as
interesting and perhaps a lot more remunerative.
The night of March 15 was no different than all the rest. As on
a succession of nights previous, he got the same terse notation.
With very little enthusiasm he ran his eyes over the slip of paper.
“Undertakers, Memorial Hospital and drop in at Erie Railroad Yards
and find Tim Crowley. He had a three-legged calf born on his farm
yesterday.” Jeff looked at the last notation twice and smiled grimly.
“Three-legged calf. Huh, it’s a little different than a hod carrier’s
dance, but I won’t set the town on fire with the story I might write
about that,” and, with a grunt of dissatisfaction, Jeff buttoned up
his overcoat and turned up his collar and fared forth into a near
zero night, and started on his monotonous rounds of undertaking
establishments, meanwhile wondering vaguely what the fellows were doing
over in Pennington, and wishing mightily that he might be sent out on a
story across the river to Montvale, where the old school was located.
Goodness knows the town was full of good news stories; why couldn’t
Boss Russell trust him with one of them. There was the prolonged
street car strike in Montvale. Why couldn’t he get an assignment to
go over there and write a story of one of their frequent riots. Then
he would have a chance to look in at Pennington, anyhow, and tell
some of the fellows what he was doing. Why couldn’t he get sent out
on a good fire story such as the warehouse fire on the east side two
nights ago. That would have been a story worth writing. Spectacular
stuff about bursting gasoline barrels, heroic firemen and all that.
There was a murder mystery in town, too. That Italian banker who had
been found dead in his own doorway with the Mafia death sign on his
forehead. Why didn’t Boss Russell turn him loose on that story, and
see if he had ingenuity enough to find Joe Gattiano, the suspected
murderer who had mysteriously disappeared from town. Other reporters
had tried and failed and the story was old now. Why not let him try
his hand? Goodness knows he couldn’t spoil the story or fare any worse
than the other _Freeman_ reporters had. Even the moth-eaten and written
out Third National Bank theft would be a relief. Perhaps he could
find some clew of the absconding paying teller, Roderick Hammond, who
nearly a month ago had disappeared from the bank at the same time that
a hundred thousand dollars worth of Liberty Bonds were discovered to
be missing. Nothing had been heard of Hammond or the bonds since, and
now after columns of speculative stories had been printed the case was
dropped and forgotten. Jeff wished that Boss Russell would give him a
chance to revive even that case again. But no, it was “undertakers,
Memorial Hospital and――and――plumbers’ dances, or three-legged calves
or――or――beans.” Jeff snorted the last in disgust as he turned into the
first mortuary chapel on his list.
Jeff Thatcher was a cub reporter. But he was not the cubbiest cub
reporter that had ever tried to break in on the _Freeman_. He was a
born newspaper man. He loved the work. Ever since he had shed knee
trousers he had been enthusiastic about journalism, and about the
next best thing to finishing out his course at Pennington, in Jeff’s
estimation, was serving as a reporter under Boss Russell. The _Freeman_
was a morning paper. It came onto the news stands and street corners
in the dark hours before dawn so that newsboys could deliver it in
time to have it read over breakfast tables or in the street cars while
New City’s business men were on their way to office, store or shop.
And to get a newspaper out at that time of day meant that reporters,
typesetters and pressmen must work all night. Jeff came into the
editorial rooms at six o’clock at night just when other young business
men were going home to their evening meal and rest. And Jeff, with
others of the staff, worked on through the night until two or three
o’clock in the morning gathering news of the day’s happenings and
writing stories that were read by Boss Russell and his trained copy
readers and sent upstairs to the composing room to be set in type to be
printed in the morning editions.
It was a hard life, for Jeff had to reverse his whole method of
living, working nights and tumbling into bed at four or five o’clock
in the morning to sleep until noontime or later. But if it was hard
it was also fascinating and Jeff realized that it could be made more
fascinating if he could only get a chance to work on some of the
really big news stories of the day instead of plugging along writing
obituaries and paragraphs of but little consequence.
Grumbling inwardly and feeling more or less discouraged, Jeff left
the Memorial Hospital, where he had looked over the book of the day’s
arrival and departure of patients, and talked with the intern. He
turned in the direction of the big Erie Railroad yards located west of
the city, where he hoped to find Tim Crowley, and learn the details of
this bovine prodigy that had been born out on Tim’s little farm a mile
or so from New City.
The railroad’s yards covered several acres of ground and included a big
station, a dispatcher’s office, roundhouse, freight yard, and machine
shop, and myriads of switch towers, semaphores and block signals, the
red and green lights of which blinked and winked at him in the cold
winter night as Jeff picked his way across the network of tracks to the
building in which the dispatcher’s office was located. It was mighty
cold and growing colder. Wind whipped the steam and smoke from the
roundhouse gustily across the yard, icicles of huge proportions hung
from the dripping spouts of the crane-like nozzles of the water tanks,
and the few switch engines that sputtered about the yards, shunting
cars here and there,――coughed hoarsely as if the cold had somehow
gotten into their iron chests and made them a bit asthmatic.
Jeff pushed open the door of the dispatcher’s office, to be greeted with
a rattling fusillade from a score of clicking telegraph instruments that
were spattering the air full of, to Jeff, unintelligible dots and
dashes. It was warm and cheerful in there and he made for a bulky steam
radiator that was hissing comfortably, as he pulled off his gloves and
breathed on the tips of his fingers.
Tom Kelly, the big, good-natured chief dispatcher, in shirt sleeves and
vest, got up from his desk and came over to greet him.
“Hello, Jeff. Ain’t seen you in a week. What gust of wind blew you over
in this direction?” said Kelly.
“Came over to see Tim Crowley. Where is he and what is there to the
story about his――”
“Oh, that three-legged calf. Funny blamed thing, isn’t it? But it’s
facts. Some of the fellows saw it. Tim’s the wrecking boss. You’ll
find him on the wrecking train over on track sixteen. It’s warm and
cheerful over there and the whole wrecking crew are probably playing
cards in the ‘hack.’ If you get over you might be just in time to have
a midnight snack with them. They eat about this time,” said Kelly,
looking at his watch.
“Thanks. So long. See you again some time,” said Jeff, buttoning up his
coat once more and going out into the night.