Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

74

MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

editor of the Daily Advertiser and afterward the historian
of presidential elections and for a quarter of a century
the managing editor of the Youth's Companion. Stanwood
was my senior by ten years as an alumnus of Bowdoin
College. It was only last year that his long life of professional usefulness and innumerable kind offices to many
came to its lamented end.
I had wanted to be a physician. The immediate purpose
of the present occupation was to earn money for a medical course. This purpose atrophied as the charm of the
yellow copy paper, the smudgy proof-sheets, the columns
of type in the curved turtles and the early-morning clank
of the double-decked cylinder press fully possessed the
soul of ambition. It has always been regarded by myself
as a felicitous thing for my visionary patients that I was
thus switched away from their visionary bedsides. I
cannot imagine anybody less suited to the practice of
that respected profession.
The Daily Advertiser of that day was a vast blanket sheet
with a page more than double the size now standard. Its
columns seemed interminable when there was one to fill.
They were crammed, however, with good writing in every
department. We used to believe that the regulations
governing the use of English in the Daily Advertiser had
been drawn up originally by the faculty of Harvard University in solemn conclave and that the professors met
from time to time to devise new refinements of speech and
to investigate the fidelity of our observance. I remember,
for example, that the word "reliable" was absolutely forbidden; the theory of the Harvard conference being, as
we understood, that you cannot "rely" anybody or anything but must rely on him or it; so that the only permissi

ble locution would be "relionable." The prescribed
synonym was "trustworthy." So strong is the influence
of codified verbotens that I have written "trustworthy"
instead of "reliable" all my life; even on The Sun, where