Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 260, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 October 1916 — TALES OF HOTEL REPORTERS [ARTICLE]

TALES OF HOTEL REPORTERS

They Were Fanciful and Readable In Good Old Days When the Imagination Had Free Rein.

If a man physician named Dr. John Jones marry a woman physician named Dr. Mary Smith, how shall they register when they go on their bridal tour? Shall they register as “Dr. John Jones and wife,” or as “Dr. John Jones and Dr. Mary Jones”? Shall they call themselves “Dr. and Mrs. John Jones,” or “Drs. John and Mary Jones”? Ah, for the old days when “hotel reporters used to give Chicago silly-sea-son problems like this one, which is now thrown into the New York news-, papers, says the Chicago Post. Those were great times, ray masters. The “hotel reporters” never had enough to do. Their superiors knew it, but they knew that the fact would stimulate the imagination. It did. Every afternoon the bored reporters would gather, with no news and nothing to write. Inevitably, they would “make up” something—this was before the day when people began to say “frame up.” They would have “Mr. Zero” of Medicine Hat paged on the hottest day Of the year. They would pull the old one about the bellboy who called "Mr. Smith” in a crowded lobby and had eighty-five men spring up and answer “Here.” They would spin interviews with strange people who just happened to drop into town and drop out again before the city editor or any rival newspaper could check up on them. Charles Dillingham, the theatrical man, was a. hotel reporter. So was Joseph Medill Patterson. So w«?re “Eddie” Westlake and many others. The work they did was just plain foolery, like the sublimely unimportant question of how Doctor Jones and wife should register. We don’t doubt that Dillingham and his generation printed that same query. It la too bad that this innocent humor is gone from the papers. It never did anybody any harm. It offended but the strictest of truthtellers.