The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-04-02
DEVELOPMENT OF HOCH.
HOJY THE "STUFFu THAT WAS
 IN HIM
Brought Country Printer to the
 Nomination for Governor of Kan


 It may be taken for granted that any new man or any new movement that springs up in Kansas is interesting, something out of the ordinary. The state of prohibition. of the Farmers Alliance and of Populism; the state of : Sockless Simpson, of William Peffer, of Mary Ellen Lease, and of Carrie Ma ton, never patterns it's acts after the ways of the "effete east" So it is like ly that Edward Wallace Hoch, who has just been nominated by Kansas repub- licans for governor of their state, is worth studying-and he is.
 Away back in the seventies he was a journeyman printer in the little village of Marion-I beg your pardon, town for the word village does not appear in the Jayhawker vocabulary. Any col lection of houses there is town" un- til it becomes incorporated, and then it is city when it attains three hundred inhabitants, unless the law has been changed in recent years.
 That year Marion was about the most discouraged, woe-begone little town of some four or five hundred people that ever built its hopes of growth upon the coming of a railroad and got left. It was the county seat. The county had voted bonds to aid the building of the railroad. The swindlers sold the peo- pie a gold brick in the shape of a rail- less grade, and on this being completed they calmly pocketed the bonds with out one thought of building culverts, or placing ties, or laying rails.
 And then that fall came the locusts- grasshoppers, the farmers call them. : By shading your eyes and looking sung ward you could see countless myriads of them. Yet they had no effect on the strong sunlight of hot, droughty fall. Tales of old-timers of a cloud of grass hoppers flying over years before were laughed at as a Munchausen yarn. The locusts threatened the crops, and made the farmers as blue as the villagers-I mean townsmen.
 The editor of the little weekly paper on which young Hoch worked was deep in debt and clean discouraged. He had { two men and a boy working for him without a cent to pay their wages. Hoch bought the business-w little there was left of it--with the printing outfit, an ancient Adams hand press, an anticipated job press and a lot of worn- out type. The papers were duly signed before a notory public; the ex-proprie- tor breathed a sigh of freedom and re- lief; the new proprietor went to the back door to watch bib, black thun- derbolt that darkened the northern sky, but there was no thunder The cloud came overhead with an indescribable whirring noise, and it began to rain not water, but grasshoppers. Though only about five o'clock in the afternoon, it became as dark as night Within fif- teen minutes not blade of grass, not a green twig. not one living green thing, was left on the face of that part of the earth
 If there was Encouragement before the cloud came up, there was conster- nation now And young Hoch had just bought dying newspaper with the certainty before him of a famine in the land during the coming winter.
 To make matters worse, the few bus mess men in the town distrusted the young editor. His politics didn't suit them: neither did his strict temperance principles; neither did his vim and en- ergy-for the old settlers, having been long isolated far away from a railroad, had become a bit fossilized The store- keepers had been supporting the paper through town pride and through sym pathy for the good fellow who had been trying to make a living out of it, not al in, a6x ici1 1tr Now they began taking out their ad- vertisements. Since the grasshoppers had come they did not care to "adver- tiz'' any longer, they said, drawing out the accent on the second syllable. The new editor declined to beg for business as a charity: he would take it as bus mess or not at all.
 But the new editor was grit, clear through. He threw off his coat an6 rolled up his sleeves. He reduced his working force to himself and boy just as shirking and as unreliable as the average boy of seventeen who is not continually prodded and watched-and that boy was ye Old Timer the writer of this sketch. Before long Hoch dis. covered that more work could be done by himself alone, and the boy went fol Q time.
 Hoch's economy did not stop there There was a stuffy little room in tht back of his shop. Into this he put z secondhand cook stove, a drygoods box for a dining table, and one or two mai kegs for chairs. He also provided him self with folding canvas cot. So there in his office he slept and fed himself a the least possible expense. Naturall, there was not parsimonious drop O blood in Hoch's generous body: but tt pinch and starve during the grasshop per winter was his only salvation; so h, pinched and starved And that is th' kind of stuff that the next governor o Kansas is made of.
 In later years better times came t the little town, to MT. Hoch and to hi newspaper the Marion Record. Tn town, which had become a city of hal as many thousand people as it had hun dreds in the year of the locusts, got tn goal of it's ambition, a railroad; Hocl himself quit "baching" and went | housekeeping with pretty countr. schoolme am his bride, and the news paper was gradually equipped with more modern plant with improved cyl finder and job presses, new type ant steam power. But it was the leal months of famine, of Encouragement Of ui1pnpiiI a ,.itv that davnIopad tb