The other invention of that year was the telephone. They are still trying to find the guy.
The first telephone exchange had only one number, Central 1. All the subscribers had to take that for their number and when you called up, there was no telling whom you would get.28
There was no rate by the month, each subscriber being charged a nickel per call. It made interesting gambling, dropping your nickel in the slot and then waiting to find out who would answer; if you expected, for example, to talk to, say, Flo Ziegfeld and a sweet voice at the other end of the line announced “This is Neysa McMein,” or “This is Florence O’Denishawn,” you had the same thrill as when a 50 to 1 shot which you have bet on at the track finishes first. Personally I always played in tough luck. I would call up Marilyn Miller and get Heywood Broun; or try for one of the Dolly Sisters and obtain Percy Hammond. It was an outrage.
The nickel a call system lasted until the repeal of the law preventing women from talking to one another. When women were at length permitted to call each other up, the company went into the hands of a telephone receiver because it was taking in only five cents a day.
In 1900, Robert Fulton invented and tried to introduce the automatic or dial telephone. His invention was turned down, unwillingly, by the phone trust in compliance with a petition from people in the then infantile motion picture industry, who argued that the strain of attempting to learn the alphabet would reek havioc with their Art.
XV
Sport Writer on The Rabies
In 1900 I turned over my medical practice to a bystander and went to work as a sport writer on The Rabies, one of the first of the so-called tabloid newspapers. This was long before the tabloids became so painfully reticent and dignified, and the editors of the various departments were annually selected from the graduating class of the Oklahoma School of Oafs. The sporting editor under whom I worked was an unrecognized cousin of Will Rogers named Haney Thwack. He had been sent to the school to be cured of a penchant for oatmeal and was given his diploma in spite of the very obvious fact that the cure was nowhere near complete. In fact, the first day I reported at his desk, I found the same covered with receptacles of all kinds filled with the pompous cereal in different stages of preparation. “Oatmeal Haney” was what the boys called him behind his back, and once or twice he overheard and just smiled. There was no offending “Oatmeal Haney.”29
“Lardner,” he said to me, “there’s a coming golf champion down in Georgia named Bobby Jones. He is now a year old, or will be in a few years. I want you to get a picture of him in the bathtub and a good human nature, personality interview.”
“But, Mr. Thwack,” I remonstrated, “how can I get an interview with a man that age? Why, I don’t suppose he can even talk plain.”
“Age makes no difference with most Georgians,” replied my superior, testing the cereal with his knee. “They hardly ever get so they can talk plain.”
Bobby was splashing at a great rate when I was admitted to the lavatory.
“What are you doing, Mr. Jones?” was my first question.
“Me take baff,” he lisped. “Me no lika baff. Min’s me of a watah hazard.”
It was comical to hear him.30
“How are you getting along with your golf?” I asked.
“Ah is jes’ tryin’ to mastah the spoon,” he said. “Dis mo’nin’ at bretfus Ah used it fo’ de fustes’ time an’—an’—(he laughed at the memory) Ah spilt evahthing.”
The youngster then posed for flashlights, with the stopper out, with the stopper in, with the tub full and with the tub empty. “Oatmeal Haney” congratulated me on my handling of the assignment and I was sent to interview Neysa McMein.
Miss McMein proved an interesting talker, once you could understand her dialect, as different from the Jones boy’s as a couple of eighth notes.
I asked her where she had got the idea of drawing covers.
“Me getty idee from ol’ Mis’ Pukkins,” she said. “Ol’ Mis’ Pukkins, she use’ draw covers fo’ de big hotel in Quincy, Illinois. Soon as de gues’ leave dere room in de mo’nin’, she draw all de covers and let de beds air.”
Miss McMein recounted the difficulties of her early career. I forget just what she did say. She overcame them some way or other and today her cover charge is $1,500.00. The friendship begun at that time ripened into something grotesque and right now there is a saying along Broadway that wherever you find Neysa McMein, Ring Lardner is probably home working.
One of the rules in The Rabies office provided that members of the sporting department get weighed every day before reporting for work and if they weighed over 135 pounds stripped (as most of them usually were), they would have to go into some other department. This was in the days prior to Prohibition and I was drinking a great deal of water, with the result that one afternoon I tipped the beam at 141.31
“Oatmeal Haney” was loath to let me go and when I was ordered to report to the city editor, he made a scene, which he afterwards tried to sell to the Follies.
The city editor, Tom Bilgewater, regarded me at first wonderingly, then tenderly.
“Well,” he said, when he had regained the use of his voice, “you are a very likely looking fellow.”32
XVI
Star Reporter for The Rabies
Old
