The Dead Mens Song | Page 6

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 read Rousseau's "Confessions" at 14--and books
replaced folks as companions. Wanted to get nearer to books and so
hired myself to the country printer and newspaper at 13--great
disappointment to the family, my mother having dreams of my
becoming a preacher--[hell of a preacher I would have made]. I had

meantime begun and finished as much as a page apiece of many stories
and books, several epic poems--but one day the Old Man went home to
dinner and left me only a scrap of "reprint" to set during his hour and a
half of absence. It was six or eight lines nonpareil about the Russian
gentleman who started to drive from his country home to the city one
evening in his sleigh with his 4 children. Wolves attacked them and one
by one he threw the children to the pack, hoping each time thus to save
the others. When he had thrown the last his sleigh came to the city gate
with him sitting in it a raving maniac. That yarn had been going the
rounds of print since 1746. The Old Man was an absent-minded old
child, and I knew it, so I turned my fancy loose and enlarged the
paragraph to a full galley of long primer, composing the awful details
as I set the type and made it a thriller. The Old Man never "held copy"
reading proof, so he passed it all right and I saw myself an author in
print for the first time. The smell of printer's ink has never since been
out of my hair.
Allison's newspaper years are rich with experience, for while he could
never be classed as a Yellow Reformer, his caustic, or amusing, or
pathetic pen, as the case demanded, has never been idle. Away back in
the old days the gambling element in Louisville fairly "owned the
town" and he attempted to curtail their power. They tried to cajole him
and to bribe him and when both alike failed, intimidated the millionaire
owner of the _Commercial_ out from under him! He either had to
sacrifice Allison or his street railway interests, and chose Allison to
throw to the lions. But he made Mr. Dupont go the whole length and
"fire" him! He wouldn't resign when asked to do so. And of course
while it all lasted Allison had his meed of personal amusement. For no
editor ever took himself less seriously. Prominent citizens came with
fair words and he listened to them and printed them; bribes were
offered and accepted only for publication; while threats were received
joyously and made the subject of half-whimsical comment.
As a newspaper man Allison prided himself on never having involved
any of his papers in a libel suit, though he was usually the man who
wrote the "danger-stuff." He had complaints, yes; libel suits, no. Dick
Ryan, known in prehistoric newspaper circles in Louisville as "Cold

Steel," because his mild blue eyes hardened and glinted when his copy
was cut--the typical police court reporter who could be depended upon
for a sobbing "blonde-girl story" when news was off--always said that
when a party came in to complain of the hardship of an article, Allison
talked to him so benevolently that the complainant always went away
in tears, reflecting on how much worse it might have been if Allison
hadn't softened the article that seemed so raw. "Damned if I don't
believe he cries with 'em, too!" said Ryan. "If I had that sympathetic
stop in my own voice I know I'd cry during ordinary conversations, just
listening to myself."
[Illustration: Young E Allison
_Caricature by Wyncie King
in Louisville Daily Herald_]
But of course the libel