When you come to think of it, it is surprising that so many newspaper
men write so that anyone but an expert can read it. The rapid and
voluminous work, especially of daily journalism, knocks the beautiful
business college penman, as a rule, higher than a kite. I still have
specimens of my own handwriting that a total stranger could read.
I do not remember a newspaper acquaintance whose penmanship is so
characteristic of the exacting neatness and sharp, clear-cut style of
the man, as that of Eugene Field, of the Chicago News. As the "Nonpareil
Writer" of the Denver Tribune, it was a mystery to me when he did the
work which the paper showed each day as his own. You would sometimes
find him at his desk, writing on large sheets of "print paper" with a
pen and violet ink, in a hand that was as delicate as the steel plate
of a bank note and the kind of work that printers would skirmish for. He
would ask you to sit down in the chair opposite his desk, which had two
or three old exchanges thrown on it. He would probably say, "Never mind
those papers. I've read them. Just sit down on them if you want to."
Encouraged by his hearty manner, you would sit down, and you would
continue to sit down till you had protruded about three-fourths of your
system through that hollow mockery of a chair. Then he would run to help
you out and curse the chair, and feel pained because he had erroneously
given you the ruin with no seat to it. He always felt pained over such
things. He always suffered keenly and felt shocked over the accident
until you had gone away, and then he would sigh heavily and "set" the
chair again.
Frank Pixley, editor of the San Francisco Argonaut, is not beautiful,
though the Argonaut is. He is grim and rather on the Moses Montefiore
style of countenance, but his handwriting does not convey the idea of
the man personally, or his style of dealing with the Chinese question.
It is rather young looking, and has the uncertain manner of an
eighteen-year-old boy.
Robert J. Burdette writs a small but plain hand, though he sometimes
suffers from the savage typographical error that steals forth at such a
moment as ye think not and disfigures and tears and mangles the bright
eyed children of the brain.
Very often we read a man's work and imagine we shall find him like it,
cheery, bright and entertaining, but we know him and find that personally
he is a refrigerator, or an egotist, or a man with a torpid liver and a
nose like a rose geranium. You will not be disappointed in Bob Burdette,
however; you think you will like him, and you always do. He will never
be too famous to be a gentleman.
George W. Peck's hand is of the free and independent order of
chirography. It is easy and natural, but not handsome. He writes very
voluminously, doing his editorial writing in two days of the week,
generally Friday and Saturday. Then he takes a rapid horse, a zealous
bird dog and an improved double-barrel duck destroyer and communes with
nature.
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Sam Davis, an old time Californian, and now in Nevada, writes the freest
of any penman I know. When he is deliberate, he may be be-traved into
making a deformed letter and a crooked mark attached to it, which he
characterizes as a word. He puts a lot of these together and actually
pays postage on the collection under the delusion that it is a letter,
that it will reach its destination, and that it will accomplish its
object.
He makes up for his bad writing, however, by being an unpublished volume
of old time anecdotes and funny experiences.
Goodwin, of the old Territorial Enterprise, and Mark Twain's old
employer, writes with a pencil in a methodical manner and very plainly.
The way he sharpens a "hard medium" lead pencil and skins the apostle
of the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, makes my
heart glad. Hardly a day passes that his life is not threatened by the
low browed thumpers of Mormondom, and yet the old war horse raises the
standard of monogamy and under the motto, "One country, one flag and one
wife at a time," he smokes his old meerschaum pipe and writes a column
of razor blades every day. He is the buzz saw upon which polygamy
has tried to sit. Fighting these rotten institutions hand to hand and
fighting a religious eccentricity through an annual message, or a feeble
act of congress, are two separate and distinct things.
If I had a little more confidence in my longevity than I now have, I
would go down there to the Valley of the Jordan, and I would gird up my
loins, and I would write with that lonely warrior at Salt Lake, and with
the aid and encouragement of our brethren of the press who do not favor
the right of one man to marry an old woman's home, we would rotten egg
the bogus Temple of Zion till the civilized world, with a patent clothes
pin on its nose, would come and see what was the matter.
I see that my zeal has led me away from my original subject, but I
haven't time to regret it now.