Montgomery County sentinel. [volume] (Rockville, Md.) 1855-1974, 1932-04-22
Not Going Back
X
A Search for Lost
Youth
X
By FANNIE HURST
t@ by Mcclure Newspaper syndioate.)
(WNU Service) "a,

AZ AURIcE sPELLMAN had
MI reached the stage where
XVI everything he did was i'm
portant. -.-.s--
A certain movement of his circu-
lated rumors in Wall Street.
International banking interests
watched him.
A real estate buy Of his In a given
district started fluctuations upward in
that vicinity.
The position Of his box at the opera
made adjacent ones especially desir-
able to their owners.
A special body Of town coupe be-
came popular because he chose 1t orig
inally for his own use.
When he decided to dispose Of his
thirty-eight-room Fifth avenue house
and build himself a thirty-room house
in section of New York hitherto un-
distinguished, 1t became quite the
esoteric thing to live there. Many
Fifth avenue mansions were subse-
Quently deserted for the East River
district made suddenly important and
desirable by the presence Of w. Maui
rice Spellman.
What actually prompted Spellman
to the move, however, was not desire
to create new social colony. On the
contrary, 1t was something diametrical-
ly opposed to that.
There had been growing within Spell
man, as his success mounted and as at
forty-six he found himself a power
among men, a sense of need of
respite from the growing demands Of
his position.
Success had not come to Spellman
without grim battle.
For thirty of his forty-six years he
had fought for it rung by rung. From
the lean days when he lived with his
parents and seven brother and sisters
in an old waterfront tenement, to his
days Of newspaper selling along lower
Broadway. then on up to the still lean
but eager days Of his cub reportership,
when he shared a walk-up, four-room
apartment in Greenwich street with
three other fellows, and so on and
so on. Through more years Of strug-
gle, deprivation, failure, struggle, then
failure again and finally the first glim-
merings of success. The foray into
Wall Street on the slender savings
out Of two years Of newspaper work.
Success. A plunge with the win
nings. More success. A clever side
swipe into copper. Twenty thousand
dollars profit over night. Then the
deluge.
From then on, practically everything
Spellman touched turned to gold.
Feature writer's had blazoned his
story over enough Sunday supple
ments to pave the way from his new
thirty-room home to the tip of Seattle.
Slogans for success were invited
from him by the bevy Of waiting re-
porters every time he stepped of
train. His arrival or departure any
time or anywhere was matter Of
national Importance.
All this from the man who fifteen
years before had been Bill Spellman,
"A struggling young reporter who
shared rather dingy downtown fiat
with three other fellows, two of whom
slept on cots In the same room with
Bill.
Strangely enough, although In q
much less spectacular way, these boys
had gone on, too. AS If contact with
the success-destined personality Of
SpeIIman had cast its power over them.
Spike Quigley, erstwhile police reporter
on the Herald, while Bill had been re-
write man, was now president Of q
large motor car corporation. RED
Dyke, also ex-rewrite man, had re-
Gently presented his daughter with q
check for fifty-thousand dollars on her
wedding day Even Slow Thompson,
special writer for the Town Review,
had since come nicely into his own
as real estate promoter in the land
parcel deals.
The old Greenwich Guys" as they
had been pleased to call themselves
had all come along in the world, so to
speak.
Spellman valued those days. Look.
ing back, they sometimes seemed to
him to have been the happlest of his
life. f..
They were the days when he had
dreamed of writing. Before the mon
and the toll had caught him In their
clutches and flung him around on the
great belt, as 1t were, Of the gigantic
wheel called struggle-for-existence.
Bill had been a dreamer back in
those days. So had all that particu-
lar little nest of fellows. The long,
talky evenings over pale red wine and
greasy italian table d'hote dinners In
subcellars, dreaming. talking, plan
ming, hoplngl And rebelllng!
Spellman had been a rebel in those
days. ..
Hating injustice. Crying out against
monopoles and against mans inhu-
mainly to man. Spellman had dreamed
OF writing the great American Conn
edle Humane, only, as he outlined 1t
to the Greenwich Guys, as they sat
talking on and on into the dream.lit
nights. his Coincide Humane was 60
Ing to show humanity the grim trag.
edy.1 as we'll
Oh. Spellman hnd dreams, all right.
They lit the dlnglness Of the poky
little over renamed fiat.
They nc the days and nights
They were the d-ehms OF ldealism
or youth with his head In the clouds