The Coolidge examiner., 1938-11-03
WHO'S
NEWS
THIS
WEEK
By LEMUEL F. PARTON

any OIl6I ANHI5
Stodcdrd on man, is the author
Shirt-SleeUe of 1T Costs to Be
oub h e d. Its
mine of previously untold stories
quickly transferred it from the book
page to the news page. Having en-
joyed a long acquaintance with Mr..
Stoddard, l dropped in at his office,
overlooking the Old Park Row which
formed his genius"
Close in nearly all his life with
wing-collar craftsmanship, he want
ed to talk about shirt-sleeve news
papering. The latter allusion had
to do with Hitchcock's Beanery,
where shirt-sleeved walters served
ham and beans to printers, stereo-
typers, reporters. editors. and poll
ticians, who mingled in a shirt
sleeve forum which Mr.. Stoddard
thinks helped to galvanize the New
York newspapers of that day-from
40 to so years ago.
Sixty-two years in newspapering,
Mr.. Stoddard is up from the case,
printer on the New York Tribune,
an ace political reporter and for
Is years owner and publisher of the
New York Mail.
ut seems to me that every re-
porter ought to know the smell
of printers ink" he said. "The
great newspaper of today, with
all its marvellous efficiency, has
lost something stimulating and
vital in no longer having this
mingling of the crafts. / re-
member that, at Hitchcock's, a
slovenly reporter might be
called down by one of those om-
niscient Old-time printers, or
perhaps it would be the other
way about, with one of the news
men berating the press room
foreman, and asking him why
he couldn't manage a decent
make-ready.
Theodore Roosevelt used to 60 to
Hitchcock's frequently, perhaps
with Jake Riis or Eddie Riggs Of
the New York Sun, and remember
James Creelman, Julian Ralph and
8 score Of then famous politicians
and newspaper men, mingling with
the men from the mechanical de-
partmentS, arguing over the world
war scare, local and national poll
tics-everything under the sun. 1t
was something like the free speech
common in early colonial America,
where you could step into the en-
closure and say what you thought
about the king or anybody or any
thing else.
THE gusto with which T. R. would
dump bottle of catsup and a Slath-
er of mustard on a plate of ham
and beans, or corned beef and
beans, was something worth seeing
aAsi remembering.
Frequently, these sessions at
Hitchcock's were a post-mortem
on the paper, just after press
time, in which any story of un-
usual distinction or a clean-cut
news beat was sure to get
cheer, and quite as certainly
any of us who had stubbed his
toe was in for a raking over.
NV work has made me an OBJ
server of our efforts to eStab-
lish true democracy in America.
have never attempted an exact
definition of democracy, but,
whatever it is, i am sure it
was eXemplified in this craft
ideal of the old-time newspaper.
The spirit seems lost in the
highly departmentalized, mech
anized and specialized charac-
ter of modern large-scale enter
prise, not only of newspapers,
but of business in general"
Stoddards family newspaper tra-
dition goes way back into the fat
bed days His great-grandfather es-
tablished the Hudson, N. Y, Regis
ter, in 1887. He learned the print
er's trade in his grandfather print
ing office at Hudson. A proofreader
on the Tribune at Is, he read proof
on the famous Tilden Ciper dis
patches, a reporter soon thereafter,
on the Tribune and the Philadelphia
Press. He wrote the first daily tele-
graph letter ever sent out from New
York city.
I ALWAYS thought the reason
Alice Paul never stayed in jail
long was that she was just wrath
and fioated through the bars. The
wan, fragile little
Tiny Feminist feminist, locked
Sets One Goal up many times in
For SUFFRAGE days past, now
fans up her Ma
tional Woman's party to the World
Woman's party, of which she be-
comes temporary chairman. Its OBJ
jective is the abolition of all legal
distinctions between men and wom-
en-, to which goal she narrowed tri-
umphant suffrage and to which she
sas held it ever since. A tiny wisp
IF a woman, she is the living refu-