Then, after I had worked as compositor on the Seneca Tribune, (with Wolfley again), the Centralia Journal, the Greenleaf Sentinel, the Atchison Daily Globe, the Atchison Daily Times, and the Kansas City Daily Journal—subbed for Harvey Hyde—I became owner of the Wetmore Spectator, buying it from Polly Shuemaker after Curt Shuemaker’s death, in December, 1890. And my education, so long neglected and retarded by circumstances, had now begun. Let me say here and now that I cherish the memory of Theodore J. Wolfley, from whom I derived, at an impressionable age, the still unshakable conviction that a newspaperman is a pretty good thing to be.
Not aiming to brag, I led the “pack” on the Atchison Daily Times with more type set in given time than any other printer. It was back in the 80’s when everything was handset. On learning that a new daily newspaper was to be launched in Atchison, I wrote to John N. Reynolds asking for a position as compositor. He replied that all cases had been filled. He said he liked the tone of my letter, and maybe there would be an opening later. I went down to Atchison anyway the day before the first issue was to come out. Reynolds said he wished I had applied earlier; that he had been told by a Globe printer—probably Charley Gill or “Doc” Tennal—that I was a swift, printer’s term for a fast type-setter. After a little more conversation, he said, “Come back here tomorrow morning—if any one of the printers fail to show up a 7 o’clock, you shall have his case.” A printer who had the night before celebrated on the prospect of a new job, came in five minutes after I had gone to work.
And while I made more money than ever before, setting bravier type—(8-point now) at 30 cents a thousand ems, had I known in advance the low character the Times proved to be, I think I should have let that disappointed celebrant have his case. Conducting his paper on something like iconoclastic order; not exactly image smashing, but unquestionably an attacker of shams—I am now thinking of “Bran’s Iconoclast,” published at Waco, Texas, about that time — Reynolds dug deeply into the private lives of Atchison’s truly great.
A prominent Atchison banker was reportedly out gunning for the editor. The Times office was in a large second floor room on the south side of Commercial street. An open stairway, the only entrance to the printing office, came up from below in the rear of the building. Reynolds, facing the stairway, always with a six-shooter tucked in his belt, worked at a flat-top desk halfway between the head of the stairs and the printers’ cases against the windows in the front end. It was watchful waiting for the eight printers.