The Dead Mens Song | Page 5

as a character note, should be added here a line or two about
a work undertaken in behalf of a friend on a few hours notice for which
he received a reward only in thanks. This friend had contracted to write
certain memoirs but was incapacitated by illness and hung out the
distress signal. Allison responded, shut himself up for a month, and
produced a smooth and well balanced work of five hundred and fifty
pages. Once I sent him a check to cover the cost of one of his books but
he declared the check a "tempting bauble" and returned it framed. But I
got a copy just the same inscribed "With the compliments of the
Author" which I prized just as much as if I had paid for it with a
clearing house certificate.
Physically he is 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