national fame mean compared with the fact that the local laws of the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” were not being enforced and that I wrote stories that remedied this condition?

I began newspaper life as society reporter of a daily paper in a Middle-Western town of ten thousand inhabitants.  That is, I supposed I was going to be society reporter, but before very long I found myself doing police assignments, sport, editing telegraph, and whatever the occasion demanded.

I suppose that the beginnings of everyone’s business life always remain vivid memories.  The first morning I reported for work at seven o’clock.  Naturally, no one was in the front office, as the news department of a small-town newspaper office is sometimes called.  I was embarrassed and nervous, and sat anxiously awaiting the arrival of the city editor.  In five minutes he gave me sufficient instructions to last a year, but the only one I remember was, “Ask all the questions you can think of, and don’t let anyone bluff you out of a story.”

My first duty, and one that I performed every morning for several years, was to “make” an early morning train connecting with a large city, forty miles away.  It was no easy task to approach strangers and ask their names and destination; but it was all good experience, and it taught me how to approach people and to ask personal questions without being rude.

During my service as society reporter I learned much, so much that I am convinced there is no work in the smaller towns better suited to women.  Any girl who is bright and quick, who knows the ethics of being a lady, can hold this position and make better money at it than by teaching or clerking.

Each trade, they say, has its tricks, and being a society reporter is no exception.  In towns of from one thousand to two thousand inhabitants, the news that Mrs. X. is going to give a party spreads rapidly by that system of wireless telegraphy that excels the Marconi—­neighborhood gossip.  But in the larger towns it is not so easy.  In “our town,” whenever there is a party the ice cream is ordered from a certain confectioner.  Daily he permitted us to see his order book.  If Mrs. Jones ordered a quart of ice cream we knew that she was only having a treat for the family.  If it were two quarts or more, it was a party, and if it was ice cream in molds, we knew a big formal function was on foot.

Society reporting is a fertile field, and for a long time I had been thinking that society columns were too dull.  My ideal of a newspaper is that every department should be edited so that everyone would read all the paper.  I knew that men rarely read the social column.  One day a man said to me that he always called his wife his better judgment instead of his better half.  That appealed to me as printable, but where to put it in the paper?  Why not in my own department?