ANECDOTES OF LIFE IN DENVER

No story of Eugene Field’s life would be true, no study of his personality complete, if it ignored or even glossed over “the mad wild ways of his youthful days” in Denver.  He never wearied of telling of the constant succession of harum-scarum pranks that made the Tribune office the storm-centre for all the fun-loving characters in Colorado.  Not that Field ever neglected his work or his domestic duties for play, but it was a dull day for Denver when his pen or his restless spirit for mischief did not provide some fresh cause for local amazement or merriment.  His associates and abettors in all manner of frolics, where he was master of the revels, were kindred spirits among the railway managers, agents, politicians, mining speculators, lawyers, and doctors of the town.  Into this company a fresh ingredient would be introduced every week from the theatrical troupes which made Denver the western limit of their circuits or a convenient break in the long overland jump.

Field’s office was a fitting retreat for the genius of disorder.  It had none of the conveniences that are supposed to be necessary in the rooms of modern managing editors.  It was open and accessible to the public without the intermediary of an office-boy or printer’s devil.  Field had his own way of making visitors welcome, whether they came in friendly guise or on hostile measures bent.  Over his desk hung the inhospitable sign, “This is my busy day,” which he is said to have invented, and on the neighboring wall the motto, “God bless our proof-reader, He can’t call for him too soon.”  But his crudest device, “fatal,” as his friend E.D.  Cowen writes, “to the vengeance of every visitor who came with a threat of libel suit, and temporarily subversive of the good feeling of those friends he lured into its treacherous embrace, was a bottomless black-walnut chair.”  Its yawning seat was always concealed by a few exchanges carelessly thrown there—­the floor being also liberally strewn with them.  As it was the only chair in the room except the one Field occupied himself, his caller, though never asked to do so, would be sure to see in Field’s suave smile an invitation to drop into the trap and thence ingloriously to the floor.  Through this famous chair, on his first visit to the Tribune office, “Bill” Nye dropped into a lifelong friendship with Eugene Field.  When the victim happened to be an angry sufferer from a too personal reference to his affairs in the paper, Field would make the most profuse apologies for the scant furnishings of the office, which he shrewdly ascribed to the poverty of the publishing company, and tender his own chair as some small compensation for the mishap.