Larry Dexter, Reporter; Or, Strange Adventures in a Great CityGaris, Howard Roger
General
Larry Dexter, Reporter; Or, Strange Adventures in a Great City
Garis, Howard Roger
New York (N.Y.) -- Juvenile fiction; Reporters and reporting -- Juvenile fiction
He said nothing to Mr. Emberg about being the only reporter on the boat
when the thing happened. But that afternoon, when all the other papers
came out, and, like the morning issues, had no account of the rescue of
the man, who was a prominent politician, the city editor said:
“I hope you weren’t ‘faking’ that story, Larry?” and Mr. Emberg looked
serious, for he did not want any of the reporters to “fake,” or write
untrue accounts of matters.
“No, sir, it actually happened,” said Larry, and he related how he came
to be the only newspaper reporter at the scene. A little later Mr.
Newton came in.
“Say,” he asked, “did we have a story of a man falling overboard on that
Democratic outing? I just heard of it on the street as I was coming in.”
He had not been in that morning, being out of town on a story.
“Oh, Larry was on hand as usual,” replied the city editor, for by this
time he was convinced that Larry’s account was true. “He has given us
another beat.”
And so it proved, for the _Leader_ was the only paper in New York that
had an account of the incident, and nearly all of the later editions of
the afternoon sheets had to use the story, copying it from the _Leader_.
“It was a good beat, and a good story of the outing besides,” said Mr.
Emberg, shortly after the last edition had gone to press, for he liked
the half-humorous manner in which Larry had written about the sack race
and the other sports in which the members of the club had indulged. “You
are doing fine work,” he added, at which praise Larry felt much
gratified.
Things were slacking up a bit in the office, now that the paper had gone
to press for the day, when one of the reporters who was looking over the
front page suddenly cried out:
“Here’s a bad mistake in that account of the meeting of the County
Republican Committee last night. It says Jones voted for Smith for
chairman, and that’s wrong. I was there. The compositor must have made a
mistake. It ought to be corrected, or it will make trouble.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late,” remarked Mr. Emberg, as he grabbed a paper
to see the error. “The presses are running, and part of the last edition
is off. The only way we can do is to have them smash Jones’s name, and
blur it so no one can tell what it is. That’s what I’ll do.”
He tore part of the page off, marked out the name to be smashed, and
called to Larry, there being no copy boys in the room then:
“Here, Larry, go down in the pressroom, and tell Dunn, the foreman, to
smash that name.”
Though Larry had been on the paper some time he had never been in the
pressroom. Nor did he know what the operation of smashing a name might
mean, but he decided the best thing to do would be to carry the message.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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