--Everybody’s Poet
Walt Mason is a poet and the world knows it. He is read by more people
than any other living writer. His prose rhymes are published in 200
daily newspapers with an aggregate circulation of about 12 millions.
Walt says his only claim on the nation’s gratitude is that he does not
go about the country reading from his “works.” Indeed, he doesn’t have
to, for his writings are read with avidity by hosts of people.
Walt Mason lives in Emporia, Kansas, most of the time, but spends
his summers in Estes Park, Colorado. He does nothing but write prose
rhymes. And at this job he is one of the hardest working men living. He
is probably the only poet who makes his living solely by the sweat of
his brow.
Many people have wondered what Walt Mason gets for his contributions to
CURTIS SERVICE. This is rather a personal question but it is sufficient
to say that he gets enough money from work of this kind so that his
monthly income has totalled as high as $875.00. At any rate, this was
the figure he gave out in an interview in a Kansas City paper in 1914,
and like everything else, prose rhymes weren’t as high then as they are
now.
As Mr. Mason himself explains, he was never a lumber dealer, though he
has tried to sell everything from hardware to hogs.
How, then, can he write lumber lyrics that hit such a responsive chord
in every lumber dealer’s mind? The Lord knows. He was born that way.
His prose rhymes “get under your hide” and under every other lumber
dealer’s hide, because Walt Mason has an interest in you and your
fellow human beings.
Walt Mason was born in Columbus, Ontario, May 4th, 1862. He was the
fifth of six sons of poor parents. When Walt was four years old his
father was accidentally killed. After his mother died, when he was
fifteen, he went to Port Hope, Ontario, and worked in a hardware store
for $2.50 a week, boarding himself. He soon forsook the hardware
business, in 1880, and crossed Lake Ontario into New York State, where
he hoed beans until he decided that there wasn’t any sense in hoeing
beans.
“Arm in arm with the star of empire,” he took his course westward,
stopping in Ohio and in Illinois, and then in St. Louis. There he
wrote “some stuff” for a humorous weekly called _The Hornet_, which
obtained for him a position at $5.00 per week doing everything from
writing gems of thought to sweeping the floors.
When _The Hornet_ went broke, Mason continued westward and worked for
three years as a hired man in Kansas. He became disgusted with the work
and managed to get a position with the _Leavenworth Times_. From there
he floated to the _Atchison Globe_, and was off and on connected with
newspapers in a dozen cities. At last, William Allen White, publisher
of the _Emporia Gazette_, offered him a position.
_The Gazette_ always printed on its first page an item of local
interest with a border around it, called a “star head.” One day,
the city editor was shy the necessary item and asked Walt to write
something to fill the space. He wrote a little prose rhyme asking
people to go to church next day, which was Sunday. The rhyme attracted
attention, and on Monday he wrote another one, and a little later on,
Walt and the “star head” became a feature of the _Gazette_. This was
the origin of the prose poem and that was when Walt Mason came to
himself--at the age of forty-five.
The rhymes of Walt Mason have had a marked influence on American
literature. Their unusual character have made the “highbrows” wonder
how to class them. His rhymes seem to be neither prose nor poetry,
though it must be remembered that the poems of the classics were
written in lineless form, and therefore, that Mason’s stuff can’t be
condemned simply because it isn’t printed like verse.
Mason used to write for a great many house organs, but today CURTIS
SERVICE, for which he has been writing since the third issue of the
publication, in September, 1913, is one of the few on his list.
Walt Mason believes that poets are born and not made. At any rate, he
says that they must have an ear for rhyme. The manner in which he sends
in his contributions to CURTIS SERVICE shows that he doesn’t chew up
many pencils paring down his rhymes and changing them about so that
their feet will toe the mark.
Though he is a poet he has but one eccentricity: he is fat. He tried
out a large number of eccentricities, because he knew all poets had to
have some, but finally decided upon being fat as the one with fewest
drawbacks and the least inconvenient.
_Who’s Who_ says he married Ella Foss of Wooster, Ohio, in 1893, and
that he is a Republican in politics and a Unitarian in religion. His
twelve million readers all acclaim him as a “regular guy.”
_Lumber Lyrics_
The prose poems appearing in this little book have been written by
me for the Curtis Companies during the past few years, and, judging
from the many letters I have received from lumber dealers all over the
country, they took kindly to the little effusions; and often these
correspondents have asked me where and when I had experience in the
lumber business.
I have had no experience in that line, except as a customer at the
lumber yards. I have bought a lot of boards and such things in my time,
and when I was buying them, or waiting for my change, I looked around.
Anybody who looks around, and who doesn’t wear blinders, observes many
things in the course of a lifetime.
I have always been interested in the things around me and close to me.
I have an insatiable curiosity; I want to know all the facts about
anything I am interested in. When I go to a lumber yard to buy the
materials for a cupboard or a coffin, I ask a million questions. I want
to know where the boards grew, and who harvested them, and how they
were prepared for the consumer, and all about them; and, as a rule,
lumber men know their own trade, and can give any reasonable amount of
information. I have been asking questions all my days; and, having a
good memory, very few facts get away from me.
And so I am prepared to write a rhyme about anything at an hour’s
notice. If I am to write about a steam engine, or a whale, or the north
pole, I usually do it without consulting any books; at various times
I have questioned people about steam engines, and whales, and north
poles, and the things they told me are on file in my memory.
So with these poems. They have been suggested by things I have heard
lumber men say, perhaps day before yesterday, perhaps twenty years ago.
There are many people who will tell you I am not a poet, and I am not
going to quarrel with them about it. The true poet, in the estimation
of the highbrows, is one who can so befuddle a subject with words that
an ordinary citizen can’t tell what he is driving at. I have never had
an ambition to be that kind of a poet. Really, I can be as cryptic as
any of them, and can write things that would give you a sick headache,
trying to understand them; but few people enjoy sick headaches.
I have never been interested in Greek gods or Lethean rivers, or
things remote, either in time or distance. Most of my life I have been
associated with people who worked hard for a living, and I have done
all kinds of manual labor myself. It is with such people, and such
varieties of labor, that my verses deal.
The lumber yard on the corner is of more enduring interest to me than
the Field of the Cloth of Gold, on which sundry kings played to the
gallery long ago. Every time the lumberman sells a wagonload of his
goods he is contributing to the general welfare, as well as to his own;
and this fact seems more important to me than any story treating of the
doings of Ulysses or any other fabled gent. So I write of lumber and
let the gods slide.
[Illustration: _Walt Mason_]