Item
BeaconMay 19, 1892
No one knows the amount of genuine, side-splitting fun a newspaper editor has during the course of a week. Monday morning he starts out, humming a psalm tune he has heard in church the day before, and before he has traversed two blocks he meets a man who wants to take his life because his name appeared in the paper the week previous. Tuesday finds the editor with the old, placid smile, but the day is not ended before a fellow with ‘blood in his eye” stops him and wants to know why in “scheol” his name is not good enough to be published in “your blankedly-blanked paper.” By Wednesday morning the traces of the precious days’ conflict have been dispelled from the editorial countenance, and its former seraphic appearance has returned. He greets his subscribers smilingly, but in one case the smile is not returned. “Stop my paper,” says the disgruntled subscriber, “you put in a paragraph about Mrs. So-and-So’s cow having died, and you wouldn’t say anything about my cow,” which was a better cow than Mrs. So-and So’s ten times over.” Then on Thursday, the light-hearted man of paper is dragged over the coals by somebody because he has not given a column to describing an entertainment, which he has served up in a half a dozen lines, and all sorts of sinister motives are hinted at. On Friday, the editor is waylaid by another, who has discovered that an opinion expressed by the paper does not agree with one he holds on the same subject, and he wants to argue the editor out of it. Saturday is “pay-day.” There is the usual number of kickers to be met with, but the newspaper publisher is so absorbed in trying to solve how it is possible to get $50 out of $20 and have any left that the complaints pass unheeded through his ears. On Sunday, he goes to church—like all good editors do—to pray for these who despitefully use him and persecute him, and he catches “fits” there at the hands of the preacher, because he, the aforesaid editor, is no better than he ought to be. Thus the days slip by, and the weeks roll around, and the years pass away—each day, and each week, and each year, adding to the newspaper man’s large and growing stock of fun. No wonder he is such a happy mortal.