The story of the Sun, New York, 1833-1918 / by Frank M. O'Brien.

SUNRISE AT 222 WILLIAM STREET

23

make the Republican, as a daily, one of the greatest of
American newspapers.
Day learned well his trade from Sam Bowles. When
he was twenty, and a first-class compositor, he went to
New York, and worked at the case in the offices of the
Evening Post and the Commercial Advertiser. He married, when he was twenty-one, Miss Eveline Shepard.
At the time of the Sun's founding Mr. Day lived, with
his wife and their infant son, Henry, at 75 Duane Street,
only a few blocks from the newspaper offices.
Day was a good-looking young man with a round,
calm, resolute face. He possessed health, industry, and
character. Also he had courage, for a man with a
family was taking no small risk in launching, without
capital, a paper to be sold at one cent.
yThe idea of a penny paper was not new. In Philadelphia, the Cent had had a brief, inglorious existence.
In Boston, the Bostonian had failed to attract the cultured readers of the modern Athens. Eight months before Day's hour arrived the Morning Post had braved it
in New York, selling first at two cents and later at one
cent, but even with Horace Greeley as one of the
founders it lasted only three weeks.
When Ben Day sounded his friends, particularly the
printers, as to their opinion of his project, they cited
the doleful fate of the other penny journals. He drew,
or had designed, a head-line for the Sun that was to be,
and took it about to his cronies. A. S. Abell, a printer
on the Mercantile Advertiser, poked the most fun at
him. A penny paper, indeed! But this same Abell
lived to stop scoffing, to found another Sun-this one
in Baltimore-and to buy a half-million-dollar estate
out of the profits of it. He was the second beneficiary
of the penny Sun idea.
William M. Swain, another journeyman printer, also