True stories of old Houston and Houstonians: historical and personal sketches / by S. O. Young. Page: 168
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168 TRUE STORIES OF OLD
he been of today he could have commanded his own salary, and
Hearst would have gone down on his knees to get him on any
of his papers.
He was the Texas representative of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat,
which made a special feature of crimes in Texas. They
could not have gotten a better man than he, for he had absolute
genius in handling such matters. He could take an ordinary item,
such as an exchange of shots between gentlemen, which would
be dismissed with a few paragraphs today and turn out a couple
of columns of as sensational and readable stuff as anyone could
wish to see. The doctor got to be a monomaniac on the subject
of crime. He thought of nothing else, and with him no other
item had even the flavor of news. Tell him that a syndicate
was going to build a million dollar hotel and the chances were
that he would forget it before he had gone a block, but tell him
that a negro bootblack had used a razor on a competitor and he
would run all over town to get the details, or the hints for details
to be supplied. I met him one afternoon and he was in great
good humor? "The old town is waking up," he said. "Things
are beginning to boom. Why, I got a suicide and a murder this
afternoon and I haven't had two such good items in a long time."
Just that little remark will show you what kind of a reporter
he was.
Very frequently the doctor furnished some of the sensations
himself, for he published the news as he found it, painted and
exaggerated, of course. He spared no one, and, of course, was
frequently in hot water. It is an actual fact that on one occasion
there was a woman with a bull whip in her hand on one corner,
a banker with a six-shooter on another corner and a policeman
with a club further down the street, all waiting for the doctor,
because he had written them up in the Globe-Democrat. Now,
the funny part of it was that the doctor, totally oblivious to
the fact that there was so much war fixed for him, just at that
very time, was engaged in a knock down and drag out with little
Quick, a reporter on the Age, not two blocks from where his
friends were waiting for him. The trouble between the doctor
and Quick had no connection with the St. Louis paper, but it
surely saved the doctor a lot of trouble that morning. I believe
the woman and the banker did catch him afterward, but they
had had time to cool off and were not so enthusiastic as they
would have been while the grievance was fresh on their minds.
When I was about six years old a German stabbed his wife in
the street and she was taken into my grandfather's house and
died in his dining room. The man was convicted and sent to
the penitentiary for life. Thirty years afterward he was pardoned.
One of the newspapers mentioned the location of the
murder and also mentioned the fact that the woman died in my
grandfather's house. Dr. McBride hunted me up at once. I told
him all I knew, which was simply the fact that she was stabbed
and brought into the house and died a few minutes afterward.
That was enough for him. He got three columns of as magnifi-
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Young, Samuel Oliver. True stories of old Houston and Houstonians: historical and personal sketches / by S. O. Young., book, 1913; Galveston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth24646/m1/168/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.