His own practicable English he believed he had learned through his newspaper training.  He first worked in the printing office of the Oakland Times, then became a reporter for that paper.  He went campaigning and made speeches for the Prohibition candidate for Governor in 1884—­before he was twenty-one.  The next year he was reporting for the Alta California, edited by Colonel John P. Irish, himself a fiery orator, of the denunciatory type.  Colonel Irish recalls that he was at once impressed with the “copious and excellent vocabulary” of his ambitious reporter, who was, even then, he says, “determined upon a high and useful career.”  In a letter to Colonel Irish, in 1913, Lane wrote, “That simple little card of yours was a good thing for me.  It took me for a minute out of the maelstrom of pressing business and carried me back, about thirty years, to the time when I was a boy working for you—­an unbaked, ambitious chap, who did not know where he was going, but was trying to get somewhere.”

It is interesting to notice that in youth he did not suffer from the usual phases of revolt from early teachings.  His father was a Prohibitionist, and Lane’s first campaign was for a Prohibition candidate for Governor; his father had been a preacher and Lane, when very young, thought seriously of becoming a minister, so seriously that he came before an examining board of the Presbyterian church.  After two hours of grilling, he was, though found wanting, not rejected, but put upon a six months’ probation —­the elders probably dreaded to lose so persuasive a tongue for the sake of a little “insufficiency of damnation” in his creed.  One of his inquisitors, a Presbyterian minister, went from the ordeal with Lane, and continued to try to convert him to the tenets of Presbyterianism.  Then suddenly, at some turn of the talk, the clergyman abandoned his position and said carelessly, “Well, Lane, why not become a Unitarian preacher?”

The boy who had been walking the floor at night in the struggle to reconcile the teachings of the church with his own doubts—­knowing that Eternal Damnation was held to be the reward for doubt of Christ’s divinity—­was so horrified by the casuistry of the man who could be an orthodox minister and yet speak of preaching as just one way to make a living, that he swung sharply from any wish to enter the church.

The strictness of the orthodoxy of his home had not served to alienate his sympathies, but he was chilled to the heart by this indifference.  He remembered the episode all his life with emotion, but he was not embittered by it.  He was young, a great lover, greatly in love with life.

[Illustration with caption:  Franklin K. Lane at eighteen]

In 1884, when he entered the University of California, it was as a special not as a regular student.  “I put myself through college,” he writes to a boy seeking advice on education, “by working during vacation and after hours, and I am very glad I did it.”  He seems to have arranged all his college courses for the mornings and carried his reporting and printing-office work the last half of the day.