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The High and Noble Works of Journalism in Jericho

❧ Jericho, Kansas, possessed two newspapers. Or perhaps it would be more exact to say that Jericho was possessed by two newspapers, in somewhat the manner that the celebrated devils possessed the Gadarene swine of Holy Writ, and with almost an equally confusing effect.

Neither paper ever came close to winning any Pulitzer prize for outstanding journalism, being alike shoddy, acrimonious, and carrying the freedom of the press to the point of license, particularly when discussing politics, scandal, or one another.

Of the two, the Daily Clarion was the less objectionable. It once had been a journal of some dignity, being the Wedge family newspaper, established by Senator Tucker Wedge and edited and published by him until his death. The senator was a man of intense self-assertion and considerable glibness that in some quarters went for wit, in others brilliance, and in others for superficiality or malice. He loved a phrase so well that he would out with it if it stabbed his dearest friend. As a result he accumulated so large a complement of enemies, at home and throughout the state, that eventually the sovereign voters kicked him out of his seat in the United States Senate.

Nevertheless, Senator Wedge did possess a curious streak of integrity, which propelled him from time to time into big, popularity-sapping fights. For example, he was for prohibition at a time when the issue was highly unpopular in honestly wet Jericho. At another time he fought the Ku Klux Klan in a day when that sheeted order could muster a parade of three thousand devotees in regalia, equipped with all the prejudices, intolerances, and sadistic inclinations fostered by the kleagles and the klaxons; and including not only the stupid and illiterate, but also ornaments of the city administration, the bar association, and the ministerial brotherhood, who belonged to it for reasons of expedience, political, legal, or divine.

None of these battles were waged for money. In fact, Senator Wedge lost advertising and friends in all of them. Nevertheless, the Daily Clarion out of them gained a sort of reputation for honesty of conviction that continued throughout his lifetime.

When the senator passed on to his reward—because of a heart attack due to too much golf at the Jericho Country Club after overeating at lunch—his widow, Mrs. Algeria Wedge, carried on in much the same manner, even ordering a delegation from the Rotary Club out of her office when they waited upon her to protest the Clarion’s attacks on a brother Rotarian, who also happened to be a very venal city manager.

The delegation consisted of twenty important advertisers, and they hinted they would withdraw their advertising if Mrs. Wedge did not see fit to comply with their ultimatum. For answer she called for someone to rummage cuts of all the businessmen present and dared them to do their worst—she would have a story printed that day proving that the popular city manager had his hand in the public till, and was prepared to write a front-page article herself about the members of the delegation, showing forth the manner in which the free press was being intimidated. The ultimatum bearers quit like twenty chastised dogs.

All this somewhat top-lofty journalistic attitude changed after Mrs. Wedge’s death, and particularly after the Morning Sentinel began publication.

The Morning Sentinel was established, with outside money, by the brothers Eddie and Tony Ender. Not news, but revenue, was their chief and only concern, their editorial department only a vassal to the advertising department. Any kind of advertising was accepted, providing there was cash to be paid for it. The pages of the Sentinel sprouted a poisonous fungoid growth of patent medicines, quack practitioners, potency pills, occultism, and fake investment opportunities. Every advertisement could, and did, command a news story in the paper’s columns. It was Tom Pollock, the elderly barrister, who one day paraphrased:

“Count that day lost whose low descending sun

Finds not some blurb upon the front-page run.”

But the Sentinel had another source of income; achieved by suppressing stories as well as publishing them. Private detectives on regular retainers made periodic reports from Kansas City, Wichita, and Denver—the most popular joy spots for errant Jericho lotharios. Among the fish caught in this net at various stages of history were some of the city’s most prominent businessmen—and even a matron or two of high social standing—who were engaged in extracurricular dalliances of one kind or another.

The Sentinel was always most tender and discreet about such matters, as witness its regard for the sensibilities of Mr. Julius Simpson, the popular undertaker, owner of the Simpson Family Mortuary (“Dignity and Service Conveniently within Your Means”) and the Tower Memorial Lawns cemetery.

Mr. Simpson, rubicund, benignly solemn, in his fifties, a grandfather, and rich from a busy and fruitful lifetime of planting at outrageous prices the city’s defunct, was superintendent of the Sunday school of one of Jericho’s most important churches. His grandfatherly interest in children was highly esteemed; but people did not know that he carried his grandfatherly interest so far as to transport one of the children under his wardship to an out-of-state city for her education and his refreshment.

The pupil in question was Charlene Peckham, fourteen years old but precociously rounded and pert, whose father, a local truck driver, believed her to be visiting a girl friend in Denver, whereas she was occupying a hotel room with that portly old frog, Mr. Simpson. This liaison was duly reported by a detective to the brothers Ender.

But observe the tact and the gentle ruth of the Enders. Instead of cruelly exposing this affair to the public, they merely called its regrettable circumstances—with affidavits sworn by a reliable investigation service—to the attention of the elderly lothario himself on his return to the city.

Mr. Simpson, when he was confronted with this information, lost his customary rubicund hue and resembled rather strikingly one of the cadavers which had been lying about nine days on a slab in the rear of his own embalming rooms.

But he survived, and it might have been noted that thereafter the pages of the Sentinel were heavy with advertising from the Simpson Family Mortuary, to the amount of ten thousand dollars above the regular budget. Since, however, this maintained the press in its freedom, and since no whisper concerning Mr. Simpson and his idyll with the precocious young nymph Charlene ever got out, and since Mr. Simpson thereafter lived a rigidly exemplary life, being almost afraid to look over his shoulder for fear a gumshoe was following him, the results might be considered in some degree worthy.

It should be added that the truck-driving father of Charlene never knew; it would have been cruel to wound his feelings with knowledge of his daughter’s betrayal, and he did not have the money to purchase any advertisements in the Sentinel anyway.