Show var NEWS THIS WEEK by LEMUEL F PARTON none EW YORK henry L stoddard ia one of the best of all american political reporters friend of more presidents and cabinet officers than any other living stoddard on man is the author shirtsleeve shirt sleeve of it costs to be ng president just published its mine of previously untold stories quickly transferred it from the book page to the news page having en joyed a long acquaintance with mr stoddard I 1 dropped in at his office overlooking the old park row which formed his genius close in nearly all his life with wing collar statesmanship he wanted to talk about shirt sleeve news papering the latter allusion had to do with hitchcock s beanery where shirt sleeved waiters served ham and beans to printers stereo cypers reporters editors and poll poli ticiano who mingled in a shirt sleeve forum which mr stoddard thinks helped to galvanize the new york newspapers of that day from 40 to 50 years ago sixty two years in news papering mg mr stoddard is up from the case a printer on the new york tribune an ace political reporter and for 25 years owner and publisher of the new york mail I 1 it seems to me that every re porter ought to know the smell of printer printers s ink he said I 1 the great newspaper of today with all its marvelous efficiency has lost something stimulating and vital in no longer having this mingling of the crafts I 1 re member that at a slovenly reporter might be called down by one of those om ni old time printers or perhaps it would be the other way about with one of the news men berating the press room foreman and asking him why he couldn coulden t manage a decent make ready theodore roosevelt used to go to te hitchcock s frequently perhaps with jake alis or eddie riggs of the new york sun and I 1 remember james creelman julian ralph 17 and a score of then famous politicians and newspaper men mingling with the men from the mechanical de apartments part ments arguing over the world war scare local and national politics everything under the sun it was something like the free speech common in early colonial america where you could step into the enclosure and say what you thought about the king or anybody or anything else the gusto with which T R would dump dd mp a bottle of catsup and a slather of mustard on a plate of ham and beans or corned beef and beans was something worth seeing and remembering frequently these sessions at hitchcock s were a post mortem on the paper just after press time in which any story of un usual distinction or a clean cut news beat was sure to get a cheer and quite as certainly any of us who had stubbed his toe was in for a raking over my work has made me an ob server of our efforts to lish true democracy in america I 1 have never attempted an exact definition of democracy but whatever it is I 1 am sure it was exemplified in this craft ideal of the old time newspaper the spirit seems lost in the highly departmentalized mech and specialized charac ter of modern large scale enterprise not only of newspapers but of business in general stoddard s bamily newspaper tradition goes way back into the flat bed days his great grandfather es the hudson N Y regis ter in 1787 he learned the printer s trade in his grandfather s printing office at hudson A proofreader on the tribune at 15 he read proof on the famous tilden ciper dis patches a reporter soon thereafter on the tribune and the philadelphia press he wrote the first daily tele graph letter ever sent out from new york city I 1 T ALWAYS thought th 0 u the reason alice paul never ne v er stayed in jail long was that she was just a wraith and floated through the bars the wan fragile little tiny feminist f feminist e inist locked sets one goal u up many times in for suffrage days past now fans up her na dional woman s party to the world woman s party of which she be comes temporary chairman its objective is the abolition of all legal distinctions between men and women e to which goal she narrowed tn tri suffrage and to which she has held it ever since A tiny wisp of a woman she is the living refu tation of s contention that will and intelligence never go together Q consol dated news features service |