In every community you will find members of the “has-been club” who can tell you interesting stories of their experiences in politics. Your readers will peruse with interest stories of old-time baseball players, early-day firemen, pioneer photographers and other equally interesting characters. Another theme of perennial interest is the telling of the stories of the men in your community who have been successful and by “being successful” I do not mean mere money grubs who have large balances in the bank. I mean the tracing of the development of a man’s character from boyhood on, and the describing of how he has met the testing times in his life and how he has served, or failed to serve, his fellow men. There is no community anywhere, no matter how small, in which you will not find plenty of human interest material if you are intent on finding it.
Story in Colored Mammy
I dropped off at Albany the other day. After finishing my business I had a half day on my hands. I ran across an old colored woman, Amanda Johnson, 92 years of age, who had come to Oregon in 1852 and who, as a girl, had been given away as a wedding present. Though she had been a slave nearly twenty years, she was proud of the fact she had never been bartered for, nor sold, and that all of her brothers and sisters had been given away to the various members of the family as wedding presents. An hour later I discovered J. H. B. Miller, a brother of Joaquin Miller, and from him I obtained a lot of hitherto unrecorded facts about the boyhood experiences of the poet of the Sierras.
Pawnbrokers are a first class source of human interest. So are policemen. So are the occasional world travelers who drop into your community on business or pleasure. Stage drivers and garage men, conductors and brakemen, hotel clerks and telephone operators all can give you many a good news tip, providing you are a good mixer and show appreciation of their tips.
The trouble with most of us is that we overlook the stories around us. I have a friend here in Oregon, who went to Alaska when gold was discovered in the Klondike. He put in 20 years mushing all over Alaska and came home broke and discouraged, to find within a few miles of his own farm, a rich ledge of hematite iron ore, which will make him more money than a gold mine in Alaska.
Must Ask Questions
Do you remember when the school muster in Barrie’s story of Sentimental Tommy was angry and jealous because his long-time customers transferred their allegiance to Tommy because they preferred his letters to the dominie’s? When the dominie asked them the reason for having Tommy write their letters one of them said, “He asks us questions, and so he can write better letters than you do.” Tommy had happened on the secret of successful writing. Unless you are interested in the story, you will not ask the questions that will bring out all the facts. Some years ago I interviewed an old time trapper—a man who had trapped beaver with Kit Carson in the early forties. He was 92 years old. When I had secured my story, I said to his wife, who was much younger than he, “Tell me how you happened to fall in love with your husband.” She answered in a discouraged and dispirited voice, “I didn’t, mister. I married him so as to get a widow’s pension. I was 23 and he was 72 and he was getting a pension for being a soldier in the Mexican War. He looked kind of frail when I married him. That was 20 years ago. Looks like he never would die.”
No matter how much a man has been written up, there is always some unusual angle that you can get on his story if you have any real spiritual insight.
When I visited Billy Sunday some time ago he and Ma Sunday started to give me the regulation type of story, which had neither freshness nor originality and which would have proved a dud, if I had used it. Instead, I obtained a story of his experiences in a foundling asylum.
