MONDAY morning is not a pleasant time in the office of an evening newspaper.
The staff, who have spent Sunday as Providence gave them wisdom, or the lack thereof, are cross and tired. A lot of news has piled up during the past thirty-six hours, which means extra work. Add to this the gloom that accompanies Monday morning the world over, and you will have a fair idea of the atmosphere pervading the city room of the New York Evening Planet on the forenoon of a certain Monday in the year of Our Lord 1897.
The big apartment, light on three sides, was dotted with a miscellaneous collection of tables, roll-top desks, reporters' table-desks, and chairs in varying stages of disrepair. The high ceiling was criss-crossed with green-coated electric wires, from which hung shaded arc-lights. Other wires, painted yellow like walls and ceilings, ran blindly to and from telephone boxes and telegraph instruments.
The floor was thickly strewn with trampled, torn newspapers, crushed sheets of "flimsy" and "copy-paper," cigarette-stumps, matches, ashes, and letters.
Four copy-readers bent over their desks, editing early morning stories or putting "c.l.c." heads and "agate" marks on police headquarters slips.
The assistant city editor, a pleasant-faced man with a long blond mustache and childlike blue eyes, had finished making out the assignment schedule for the day and was handing clippings to reporters.
A clump of office-boys, their real work for the day not yet begun, loafed about the pneumatic tubes. A discontented reporter in one of the booths was taking down a story dictated over the telephone by the man in charge of the Brooklyn office. Three other reporters sat smoking, too cross to talk.
And over all the scene rested the aforesaid cloud of Monday-morning gloom.
This dreary aspect would be dispelled three hours later by the rush and bustle incident on "going to press." The
Planet, being an evening paper, went to press for the first edition at eleven-thirty a.m. This was before the days when war exigencies enabled the public at large to buy "evening" papers at eight-thirty in the morning.
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