“Aerial Utilities Company; those Chicago boys, Napier and Hope and their friends.”
The editor thought a moment, glanced at the clock on the wall where the hands pointed to eleven and then said:
“If you can be here by a quarter after twelve, hurry in. If you can’t make it, phone. Get up all the stuff you can. Are Napier and Hope at the factory?”
“They made a test to-night. I know where they went. I was outside the yard. They were gone from ten o’clock till ten twenty-five; were all over New York and forty miles to sea. It—”
“Grab the eleven fifty express and hustle in,” interrupted the man at the telephone. “It’s good stuff and’ll stand a couple o’ columns.”
Hanging up the receiver, the night city editor settled back in his chair, finished lighting his pipe and then, his head leaning in his clasped hands, seemed to be in a reverie. But this did not last long. While he had talked to “Stewart in Newark” three young men had hurried to his desk and laid on it stories or parts of stories on which they had been working. These reporters were now standing a few feet away awaiting further orders or dismissal for the night.
“Dick,” exclaimed the editor as he suddenly unclasped his hands, leaned forward over his desk again and shuffled the copy on it into a little bundle, “we’ll want about two and a half columns in the last edition.” As he spoke, a middle-aged man in his shirt sleeves—for the night was mid-June—leaned backward from a near-by big table at which a dozen men were busy cutting, rewriting and pasting copy, and took the little bundle of manuscript from his superior’s hands.
The waiting reporters groaned inwardly. They knew that this was probably the death warrant for their own evening’s work. Dick, the man addressed, asked nothing and made no inquiry. He knew that something big had turned up. As head copy reader the securing of this “something” was no business of his. Nor did the nature of it stir his calloused curiosity. His orders were to save two and a half columns of space and this he would do. When the story came, he and his assistants would see that it was two and a half columns long and no more.
But this was not the attitude of the three reporters yet waiting near the editor’s desk. This man was no longer in a reverie. In those few minutes he had “blocked out” his big story; he already saw it in print and, unlike Dick, he was now ready to go after it.