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I Had to Tell It
335
40. I don't see yet why she was so disturbed; we said 21. Anyhow, her friends thought it a great joke and we sold that issue out entirely. Figure it for yourself at ten cents each. Our publishing costs were exactly nothing, because the steamship company furnished the paper and the mimeographs. The mathematics, if you insist: i social note = 1 50 papers =$15 .00. Easy.
The most consequential item we ever printed was probably the most innocent in intent. My watch at the key was nearly over, the paper was almost written, but at the very end was a disgusting gap. So in the "Ship Gossip" department, this harmless paragraph went in:
Shipboard conversational struggles are frequently difficult, and the Radio News is making its heroic struggle to aid the Tionesta traveling public to a way out. Any bona fide passengers (i. e., those who have paid their passage money and who can point to at least 8 laps around the deck per day) who submit five good conversational tags to replace the following will be given a year's free subscription to the News:
(1) "Isn't it calm?"
(2) "Have you walked your mile?"
(3) " Do you like the water?J'
(4) "Don't you think ships are romantic?"
(5) "Are you seasick?"
The next morning one hundred and fifty (150) passengers, by actual count, dashed up to the radio cabin and demanded to know if 1 referred to their conversations in the radio room on this day or that. Husbands accompanied protesting wives, small children and older men all came and made me verbal faces. What did I mean by slurring them? But the husbands' eyes held a twinkle.
Another time we had a party of life insurance men and their wives aboard. The trip was awarded them as a bonus for selling $100,000 or more insurance in a year. Things were growing dull after the second day and the di
"HUSBANDS ACCOMPANIED PROTESTING WIVES
'Small children and older men all came and made me verbal faces"
rector of the party dropped in the radio room for a chat.
"What am 1 going to do to amuse these people to-morrow?" he asked, hardly expecting an answer. I looked at our broadcasting receiver, and was struck by one of the few good ideas I ever had. "Why don't you give them some special broadcasting: a personal message from the president of the company, back in C ?"
" But we can't arrange that," he argued. "There isn't time."
" You see that power amplifier on our broadcast set?" He admitted he did. "Well," said I, "we have a telephone transmitter rigged on it so we can talk into the loud speaker up forward, where the radio concerts come in. Your president controls the broadcasting station in C — and if you will write a speech that he might give and dig up a man here in your party who talks like him, I 11 do the rest."
We did. Our paper came out the next morning with the announcement of a special message to be broadcasted to the insurance party aboard our ship, and the whole crowd thought it was great. The actors got together in our cabin