The Dead Mens Song | Page 5

of medium height, rather slight in form and, when walking, stoops a bit with head forward and a trifle to one side. In conversing he has a captivating trick of looking up while his head is bent and keeping his blue eyes nailed to yours pretty much all the time. Around eyes and mouth is ever lurking a wrinkling smile and its break--the laugh--is hearty and contagious with a timbre of peculiar huskiness. His face is a trifle thin through the cheeks, which accentuates a breadth of head, now crowning with silvery--and let me whisper this--slowly thinning hair. Stubby white mustaches for facial adornment, and cloth of varying brown shades to encompass the physical man, complete the picture.
Such is Young Ewing Allison as I see him.
MAN _and_ NEWSPAPER MAN
Young Allison is a Kentuckian (Henderson, December 23, 1853) and proud of it with a pride that does not restrain him from seeing the peculiarities and frailties as well as the admirable traits of his fellow natives and skillfully putting them on paper to his own vast delight--and theirs too. What he gives, he is willing to take with Cromwell-like philosophy: "Paint me warts and all!" To speak of Allison in any sense whatever must be in the character of newspaper man, since to this work his whole life has been devoted. And if I may speak with well intentioned frankness: He's a damn good editor, too! However little our lay friends may understand this message, aside from its emphasis, I rest secure in the thought that to the brotherhood it opens a wide vista of qualifications to which reams might be devoted without doing full justice to the subject. Today he might not be the ideal city editor, or night editor, or managing editor of our great modern miracle-machines called newspapers, but I have yet to meet the man who can more quickly absorb, analyze, sum-up and deliver an editorial opinion, so deliciously phrased and so nicely gauged. He who can do this is the embodiment of all staff editors!
If I may be pardoned for a moment, I will get myself associated with Allison and proceed with this relation. In 1888 he left daily newspaper work to found _The Insurance Herald_, though he continued old associations by occasional contributions, and in 1899 sold that publication and established _The Insurance Field_. In the fall of 1902 when presented with the opportunity of becoming editor-in-chief of _The Daily Herald_ in Louisville, he gave up temporarily an active connection with _The Insurance Field_ and in January, 1903, chose me to carry on this latter work, from which I am thankful to say he was absent only three years.
Allison is newspaper man through and through and was all but born in the business for he was "a devil in his own home town" of Henderson in a printing office when thirteen, "Y. E. Allison, Jr., Local Editor" on the village paper at fifteen and city reporter on a daily at seventeen. Up to this point in his career I might find a parallel for my own experience, but there the comparison abruptly ceases. He became a writer while I took to blacksmithing according to that roystering Chicagoan, Henry Barrett Chamberlin, who thinks because he once owned a paper called _The Guardsman_ in days when a new subscription often meant breakfast for the two of us, that he is at liberty to cast javelins at my style of writing. And yet, to be perfectly frank, I have always been grateful for even _his_ intimation that I had a "style." Allison once accepted--I can hardly say enjoyed--one of those subscription breakfasts------But that is a matter not wholly concerned with his newspaper experience, which has extended through nearly all the daily "jobs:" reporter and city editor of _The Evansville Journal_, dramatic and city editor of _The Louisville Courier-Journal_; managing editor of _The Louisville Commercial_, and after a lapse of years as previously told, editor-in-chief of _The Daily Herald_.
Fifteen years or more ago, long before we dreamed of being associated in business, Allison wrote me with the frankness that has characterized our friendship from the first, just how he came to enter newspaper work. Where he was concerned I was always "wanting to know" and he seemed ever willing to tell--me. The letter was as usual written in lead pencil on soft, spongy, ruled copy paper and that portion having reference to the subject named is given verbatim:
You see I lost two years going to school--from seven to nine years old. I was put out of all the private schools for incorrigible "inattention"--then it was discovered that I had been partially deaf and not guilty--but my schooling ended there and I was turned loose on my father's library to get an education by main force--got it by reading everything--had