been the editor of the Lampoon while at college, and was looked upon by his classmates as a particularly bright and witty fellow. Upon arriving at San Francisco, the youth—to show his independence of parental patronage—sought and received employment on the Examiner, in whose columns the poem appeared during his term of service.
The following letter, being the second in a series establishing his authorship of the poem, explains itself:
"February 4, 1905.
"To the Sporting Editor of the News:
"Since writing to you the other day, other facts about 'Casey' have occurred to me which, perhaps, will be of interest to you. Except as originally published in the Examiner. 'Casey' has never been correctly printed—barring one or two cases in which I have furnished the copy. When the poem was first copied into an Eastern paper—I think by the New York Sun—the clipping editor cut off the opening stanzas and began where Casey advances to the bat. Later on, Mr. Hopper began to recite the complete poem as it was given to him by Mr. Archibald Clavering Gunter, who saw it in the Examiner. Some one who heard Hopper's recitation wrote out the first five stanzas from memory—and a very bad memory he must have had—and tacked them to the mutilated version as it was printed in the Sun and many of its exchanges, and then published a combination which has been printed up and down the land as 'Casey at the Bat.' I think that if the matter were of any importance the easiest way to establish the authorship would be to let the different claimants furnish a copy which might be compared with the poem as it was first printed in the Examiner.
"I may say, in conclusion, that though some of the mutilated reprints of 'Casey' have my name on the title page, I have never authorized them. I have left the poem to its fate—except that once I had a few copies printed for circulation among my friends, and only recently, when I am charged with falsely claiming the poem, has it seemed to me my duty to say something of my connection with it. Finally, while a certain Will Valentine may have written a Base Ball poem in a Sioux City paper before 1888, it could not have been 'Casey at the Bat,' and if anyone is anxious enough to search the files of that paper this fact will become patent. With apologies for troubling you. Very truly yours,
