The Reporter Who Made Himself KingbyRichard Harding DavisThe Old Time Journalist will tell you that the best reporter is the onewho works his way up  He holds that the only way to start is as aprinters devil or as an office boy to learn in time to set type tograduate from a compositor into a stenographer and as a stenographertake down speeches at public meetings and so finally grow into a realreporter with a fire badge on your left suspender and a speakingacquaintance with all the greatest men in the city not even exceptingPolice CaptainsThat is the old time journalists idea of it  That is the way he wastrained and that is why at the age of sixty he is still a reporterIf you train up a youth in this way he will go into reporting with toofull a knowledge of the newspaper business with no illusionsconcerning it and with no ignorant enthusiasms but with a keen andjustifiable impression that he is not paid enough for what he doesAnd he will only do what he is paid to doNow you cannot pay a good reporter for what he does because he doesnot work for pay  He works for his paper  He gives his time hishealth his brains his sleeping hours and his eating hours andsometimes his life to get news for it  He thinks the sun rises onlythat men may have light by which to read it  But if he has been in anewspaper office from his youth up he finds out before he becomes areporter that this is not so and loses his real value  He should comeright out of the University where he has been doing campus notes forthe college weekly and be pitchforked out into city work withoutknowing whether the Battery is at Harlem or Hunters Point and withthe idea that he is a Moulder of Public Opinion and that the Power ofthe Press is greater than the Power of Money and that the few lines hewrites are of more value in the Editors eyes than is the column ofadvertising on the last page which they are notAfter three yearsit is sometimes longer sometimes not so longhefinds out that he has given his nerves and his youth and his enthusiasmin exchange for a general fund of miscellaneous knowledge theopportunity of personal encounter with all the greatest and mostremarkable men and events that have risen in those three years and agreat fund of resource and patience  He will find that he has crowdedthe experiences of the lifetime of the ordinary young business mandoctor or lawyer or man about town into three short years that hehas learned to think and to act quickly to be patient and unmoved wheneveryone else has lost his head actually or figuratively speaking towrite as fast as another man can talk and to be able to talk withauthority on matters of which other men do not venture even to thinkuntil they have read what he has written with a copyboy at his elbowon the night previousIt is necessary for you to know this that you may understand whatmanner of man young Albert Gordon wasYoung Gordon had been a reporter just three years  He had left Yalewhen his last living relative died and had taken the morning train forNew York where they had promised him reportorial work on one of theinnumerable Greatest New York Dailies  He arrived at the office atnoon and was sent back over the same road on which he had just cometo Spuyten Duyvil where a train had been wrecked and everybody ofconsequence to suburban New York killed  One of the old reportershurried him to the office again with his copy and after he haddelivered that he was sent to the Tombs to talk French to a man inMurderers Row who could not talk anything else but who had shownsome international skill in the use of a jimmy  And at eight hecovered a flowershow in Madison Square Garden and at eleven was sentover the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab to watch a fire and make guesses atthe losses to the insurance companiesHe went to bed at one and dreamed of shattered locomotives humanbeings lying still with blankets over them rows of cells and banks ofbeautiful flowers nodding their heads to the tunes of the brass band inthe gallery  He decided when he awoke the next morning that he hadentered upon a picturesque and exciting career and as one day followedanother he became more and more convinced of it and more and moredevoted to it  He was twenty then and he was now twentythree and inthat time had become a great reporter and had been to Presidentialconventions in Chicago revolutions in Hayti Indian outbreaks on thePlains and midnight meetings of moonlighters in Tennessee and hadseen what work earthquakes floods fire and fever could do in greatcities and had contradicted the President and borrowed matches fromburglars  And now he thought he would like to rest and breathe a bitand not to work again unless as a war correspondent  The only obstacleto his becoming a great war correspondent lay in the fact that therewas no war and a war correspondent without a war is about as absurd anindividual as a general without an army  He read the papers everymorning on the elevated trains for war clouds but though there weremany war clouds they always drifted apart and peace smiled againThis was very disappointing to young Gordon and he became more andmore keenly discouragedAnd then as war work was out of the question he decided to write hisnovel  It was to be a novel of New York life and he wanted a quietplace in which to work on it  He was already making inquiries amongthe suburban residents of his acquaintance for just such a quiet spotwhen he received an offer to go to the Island of Opeki in the NorthPacific Ocean as secretary to the American consul