I do not mean to brag about this, for the item was largely a quotation, as any good Bible student would know. If I really wanted to brag, I would tell about the four times in one year my writings in the Spectator were selected and reprinted in Arthur Capper’s Topeka Daily Capital—maybe it was J. K. Hudson’s Daily then—as the best article of the week appearing in any of the four hundred newspapers in Kansas. Selecting and reprinting a best article was a weekly feature of the Capital for one year. I “crowed” a little about it then, and P. L. Burlingame, a school teacher—principal of the Wetmore schools in the late 80’s and lawyer thereafter in partnership with his brother-in-law, M. DeForest, in offices across the hall from the Spectator office—said that I should have been content to let the other fellow “toot my horn.” But the Capital’s readers were not my readers—and I figured nothing was too good for the home folks. Always I write for the home folks. Alex Hamel’s stories were more academically put together than anything I could write. Ecky was a school teacher. Also he was my very good friend. And it would be ungrateful of me not to acknowledge his able assistance — though his technique was rather too highbrow for my background, and I had to reject many of his literary buildups. Ecky’s writings were clothed in rhetoric and spiced with learned quotations, while I had to get along with bare limpy grammar. But then, in newspaper writing, it is not always academic learning that counts. However, it doesn’t hurt any—if one does not try to make it the whole show. And moreover, one cannot get too much of it—if one learns at the same time to “carry it like a gentleman.” Firsthand knowledge of the matter one chooses to write about, when presented in an interesting and readable manner, even though devoid of the earmarks of higher education, always scores high. For example, the late Ed. Howe, “The Sage of Potato Hill,” (his country estate), publisher of Atchison Daily Globe, and writer of numerous magazine articles, and a highly acclaimed novel, “The Story of a Country Town,” once told me that he had never studied grammar a day in his life. Like Mark Twain and Damon Runyan and Charles Dickens, Howe’s education really began when he entered his father’s newspaper office at the age of thirteen years.