Other _Sun_ reporters were Tom Cook, who came from California, had the shiniest silk hat on Park Row, and knew Fisk and the rest of the Erie crowd; Big Jim Connolly, one of the best news writers of his day; the McAlpin brothers, Robert and Tod; and Chester S. Lord, who was to become the managing editor of the _Sun_ and serve it in that capacity for a third of a century. William Young, who was city editor when Lord went on the paper, gave him his first assignment--to get a story about the effect of the Whisky Ring’s work on the liquor trade. Lord wrote a light and airy piece which indicated that the ring’s operations would bring highly moral results by decreasing the supply of intoxicants; but when the copy-reader got through with the story this is the way it read: A _Sun_ reporter interviewed several leading wholesale liquor-dealers yesterday concerning the despatch from Louisville, saying that all the old whisky in the country had been purchased by a Western firm for a rise. They said that they had sold their accumulated stock of prime whisky months ago. One firm, the largest in the city, had sold nearly two thousand barrels, stored since 1858. One shrewd dealer said it was reported that Grant was in the ring, and that he wanted to secure a supply to fall back on in his retirement. Mark Maguire, the celebrated “Toppy,” was the chief of the sporting writers. He was about the oldest man in the _Sun_ office, born before Napoleon went to Elba. He was the first king of the New York newsboys, and Barney Williams, the boy who first sold Ben Day’s _Sun_, once worked for him. Maguire had as customers, when they visited New York, Jackson, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. When prosperity came to him he opened road-houses that were the resorts of horse-owners like Commodore Vanderbilt and Robert Bonner. His Cayuga House, at McComb’s Dam, was named after his own fast trotter, Cayuga Girl. Maguire’s intimacy with Bonner was such that the hangers-on in the racing game believed that Bonner owned the _Sun_ and transmitted his views to Dana through “Toppy.” Maguire worked for the _Sun_ up to his death in 1889. When Amos Cummings had an evening to spare from his regular news work he would go with Maguire to a prize-fight and write the story of it. Maguire invented the chart by which a complete record of the blows struck in a boxing match is kept--one circle for the head and one for the body of each contestant, with a pencil-mark for every blow landed. After an evening in which Jem Mace was one of the entertainers, Maguire’s chart looked like a shotgun target, but Cummings, who watched the fighters while Mark tallied the blows, would make a live story from it.