Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 January 1896 — Field’s Joke on the Make-Up. [ARTICLE]

Field’s Joke on the Make-Up.

When Eugene Field wns city editor of the Kansas City Times, be found great amusement in annoying one of the characters employed on the paper. Ferguson was one of the “make-ups” on the paper, and in Wyandotte, where be resided, just over the line from Kansas City, he was the leader of a local temperance society. For over a year, Field, on coming down to the paper to go to work, would write a personal concerning Ferguson. Generally it ran like this: "Mr. John Ferguson, the well-known ‘make-up’ of the Tinies composing room, appeared for work yesterday evening in his usual beastly state of Intoxication.” This entertaining bit Field would send down in some bundle of copy, and the others of tlie composing room would set it up and say nothing. Poor Ferguson knew that tills awful personal was In their midst, ami every night would go carefully over every galley for the purpose of locating and killing it. It gave him vast trouble. Every now and then Field would not write his personal about Ferguson, and then the bedeviled Ferguson was worse off than ever. As long as he could not find It, it might still be there. It almost drove the poor man off the paper. Now nnd then it escaped his eagle eye and was printed, pn such occasions Ferguson’s burdens were beyond the power of even a Christian spirit to bear.