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Show I ! GEORGE APE'S HALL ROOM DA YS I j JOHN T. M'CUTCHEON ACTS AS BOSWELL TO THE AUTHOR. ' H John T. McCutcheon, the cartoonist, . and H George Ade, the author and playwright, attend- H ed Purdue University at about the same time H and joined the same college fraternity. Recently H at a dinner given in a Western city by one of H the chapters of the fraternity in honor of Ade, H who is now the national head of the fraternity, H McCutheon narrated some reminiscences of the H days when he and Ade roomed together and H worked on Chicago newspapers. In the course H of his talk he said: H "As an amateur Boswell to Mr. Ade I feel H that history should be set right upon the point H tbat we aro not twins. If we had been twins H it would have been much more convenient for H me. As it was I had to 'take a reef in the sleeves H of his shirt every time I wore it. The discrep- H ancy in our sizes did not extend to our collars, H for ho could wear mine and I did wear his. All H our collars had our firm name on them, so H that after a week or two the title to all our H property became very much clouded. H "To get the chronology of this period of our I, honored guest's career firmly fixed in our minds H, perhaps it might be well to go back a little fur- H ther and pick up his career in the ante hall- H, room days. After graduating from Purdue in H, 1887 he accepted a splendid journalistic position ' in La Payette. It paid ?6 a week at the start, H but later became more irregular until the paper Hi ceased publication and he resigned to accept a Hj lucrative position writing testimonials to adver- B tise a tobacco habit cure. H It was not a fake remedy and was guaran- B teed to cure the most persistent case if the to bacco user followed directions. The first direction direc-tion was to discontinue the use of the tobacco and then take the tablets. This position paid $15 a week, but even this princely stipend lagged behind his living expenses. If George had continued con-tinued to work in La Fayette, even with tho cost of living as low as it was in those days, he would be today one of the most prominent bankrupts bank-rupts in the state. By dint of great attention to detail he managed to accumulate quite a tidy deficit de-ficit and was devoting his leisure moments to thoughts of moving elsewhere." Mr. McCutcheon said that he was graduated at about this time, and being unable to get as good a job in La Fayette as Ade had he went to Chicago and 1890 managed to lure Ade on thexe too, -elng in need of some new collars. He contmued : "This was the beginning of our hall bedroom days, when both of us worked on the old Morning Morn-ing News, he writing and I drawing days when we were not quite poor enough to have beautiful ladies bring us Christmas baskets and not quite rich enough to buy the Christmas baskets bas-kets ourselves. We had no expensive habits and so were able to live. Our only excess was to buy a chrysanthemum at 35 cents each autumn when Purdue came to play football with Chicago. That was back in the glad days when a Purdue could go to see his team play and wear flowers both going and coming. "This hall room we inhabited was not a mere figure of speech. There was no vulgar display of wealth In its modest appointments, nothing to distract our minds from the calm contemplation contempla-tion of our literary and artistic aspirations. It was called a comfortably furnished room for refined re-fined gentlemen, but this was fulsome flattery and most misleading. "It was not comfortably furnished. Tho room, third floor back, extended in sweeping perspective perspec-tive twelve feet in one direction and ten in the other. One window, opening to the west, admitted ad-mitted a flood of sunlight in the afternoon while we wero at the office. There was one bed, which fortunately was a double one, and a folding sofa upon which we gave house parties to visiting brothers. The sofa was a great institution and had a great ridge running down the center, so that our guests never made long visits. "There was one plush covered chair of somewhat some-what august proportions; there was another chair for guests, also one bureau, one wash stand and two paintings' of the late Victoria period. per-iod. Neither was a Corot,r although there was no signature from which a connoisseur might judge. One painting represented a forest of asparagus aspara-gus in the foreground, with a lake in the middle distance, and a range of the Himalayas shooting violenly upward from the edge of the little lake. A few cows or sheep, we never determined which, grazed on the precipitous slope, while a distant sailboat gave the one touch of realism to the picture. The other picture depicted a lot of fruit, with a large pink watermelon in the background. "Among these artistic surroundings we spent our nights. A few newspapers scattered upon the carpet imparted a literary aspect to this unstudious scene of city splendor. "We often thought of the ones at home, the envious one who thought of our gay life in the city amid surroundings of luxury and magnificence, magnifi-cence, the pinnacle of which was the Palmer House barber shop. Whenever we purchased any conspicuously new articles of wearing apparel ap-parel we would go down to La Fayette to show the home folks how well we were getting on in Chicago. We thought of ourselves an men about town, and in fact we wore. 'We were j" about town much more than we were about our little radiator. "When George first went on the Morning News he was assigned the weather. He received re-ceived $10 every week, with nothing to do but explain the weather to the readers of the paper. He made the weather reports sparkle, but there was no great opportunity for a sensational hit on the weather. He couldn't get a scoop on when the sun sets and when the moon rises. "And then one night, when the office was almost deserted, his chance came. He was the only repp er in the office and the steamer Tioga seized t is moment to blow up in the Chicago river. It was a tremendous story and it was also Mr. Opportunity knocking at the door of the new reporter. "The city editor was in a panic; the managing manag-ing editor was running around in circles; the biggest story of the year and no one there but rhtto Undcrwnd ftf UndtrwttJ, N. V. GUESSING CONTEST. When Will It Close? an untried reporter. But they had to send him and the next morning there appeared in the Moin--j ing News the most brilliant piece of newspaper reporting that Chicago had seen for months. In a single leap the cub reporter became the star reporter and his salary leaped fiom $10 a week to a figure that seemed incredibly large. I think the money i oiled In at the rate of $20 a week. "About this time there came an important' change in our lives. On the paper a new artist named Schultze from Kentucky was employed. He was distinguished by a front of such grandeur grand-eur that people stopped and gazed at him on the street. He spent every spare cent on clothes and had a pointed French beard and looked like - a Russian grand duke. - "It was Schultze who first effected some kind of an arrangement with a tailor whereby clothes could be purchased by paying $2.50 a week. I became a member of this new cult, and Ade and practically the whole office force joined. The collector soon became the most familiar figure about the office. There was hardly a time when you could not look furtively around and see this collector leaning against something waiting for his $2.50, which always seemed due or overdue from some one of us. . "We felt that we ought to dress in a manner man-ner befitting a star reporter and one who roomed with a star reporter. And with the increased splendor of our clothes came increased expenses expen-ses in other directions, so that rarely a week i went by without my ring being left as hostage for a. small sum loan and never a pay day went without the ring's redemption and return. It was our gold reserve, and it had to be protected. "In the meantime in spite of the gradual increase in-crease of our prosperity we continued to live in our little hall bedroom. The reason for this was a noble one. Tho landlady was an elderly woman in poor health and she had a tubercular daughter and only four or five paying roomers. Oft in the stilly night we would decide that we w ought to get more commodious quarters, and as g&; often we would shrink from the ordeal of break- Hp ing the news. So we stayed on, month after ' month, and it was not until we had been there nearly three years that we finally left and got a room with two- beds." |