Radio broadcast .. (1922-30)

I Had to Tell It 337 was another fundamental of journalism we learned. Any small-town paper can be a success if it prints the names of enough residents even if they do nothing more startling than take a calm morning drive to the county seat. We had our tragedies, too. When static was bad it was almost impossible to get the baseball scores. What were we to do? We couldn't make them up out of whole cloth because the baseball fans would check against the daily paper at the next port. I thought in envy of a friend of mine on the South American run, who made up scores for two weeks once when his receiver went bad. He was safe, but we could only make excuses and dig up more personal items — which were nearly as good. One night about three 1 was jarred awake by my junior operator pulling at my arm. " Say," he cried, "I've got the passenger list printed but our ink has run out. What can we do? We can't print any news." "Oh, let it go at that," I mumbled, "we'll sell what we have for five cents then." Newspaper editors are always complaining that they are supposed to know everything from the date the Assouan Dam was completed to the number of children possessed by John R. Twirp, the famous movie star. And we two amateur newspaper publishers — radio operators on the side — encountered the same blind confidence on our ship. We printed the weather forecast in the paper. And one day, striking some icy weather in Lake Superior, a confident man, shivering in last season's topcoat, stopped at the door: "Say, how hot was it in Sioux Falls to-day?" Distractedly, we made a guess, and the next one came along. " Did it rain in Kenosha yesterday?" Probably. One trip we had an unusually inquisitive lot aboard. This day our paper contained some facts about the locks at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. One of the three locks in use there is 250 feet longer than those at the Panama Canal and they never fail to excite deep interest WHERE THE RADIO FUN WENT ON The good ship Tionesta, which makes an eight-day cruise between Buffalo and Duluth among the passengers. Just as we were pulling into the lock-channel about a quarter of a mile from them, a woman dashed up, quite breathless. One could see plainly she intended to miss nothing. My guess was that she was one of those mentally thirsty school teachers. "You know," she said, " I have wanted all my life to see the Locks. I've studied up about them, but there is one question I want to ask you. Which end of* the boat goes in the Locks first?" How should one answer that? Our paper brought a lot of interesting people to the cabin, too. 1 remember the oldish man from Georgia who told me about the thrill he got from tuning up his broadcast receiver in an out-of-the-way camp in Florida and letting a hundred or so of the natives who had never heard good music before in their lives listen to " Roxie" in far-away New York. And there was the energetic woman who was on her way around the world in her automobile. She had just motored through Japan and got her first news of the Japanese earthquake from our modest radio paper. She was going it alone and told thrilling stories. An American flag on the radiator of her car had saved her from capture by some bloodthirsty Chinese bandits not three months before. 1 remember best the lawyer in a small Michigan town who came in and read me Mencken and some of his own poems. Good verse it was, too. He had great stories of his trips to Washington, and interesting nights there at the Gridiron Club, where press correspondents from American and foreign papers come nightly. Our own little sheet was the introduction to that interesting evening. For the life of me I don't know whether it was more fun printing our little four-page daily or talkjng to the people who came aft to our radio cabin to praise or blame us. Perhaps (you are thinking) the real thrill came when we looked at our bankbooks at the end of the season. Perhaps.