Pathos

The newspaperman of fiction is either "hardboiled" or a cub in the seventh heaven of innocence. But the newspaperman in life is generally a man whose chief interest is his own business of gathering news and an amazing admiration for those who adhere to the fundamentals of that business. He is likewise susceptible to the most fundamental pathos.

A good example of the combination of these traits occurred last week. The following dispatch appeared in The New York Herald Tribune:

KINDERHOOK, N. Y., July 10.--Sought by state troops, Boy Scouts and posses of citizens since his disappearance Wednesday, James Wynkop Roney, nine-year-old son of Garner P. Roney, an assistant city editor of The Herald Tribune, was found drowned in Kinderhook Creek here today.

Early Thursday, however, Boy Scouts searching along the creek came upon the boy's bicycle and clothes on the bank. Divers at once went to work to locate the body, and after hours of effort it was found by Frank Gearing, chauffeur for Mrs. Franklin Townsend of Albany, who repeatedly risked his own life in attempts to bring it to the surface, so tightly was the body enmeshed in underwater weeds. A rowboat and grappling irons were brought overland from Kinderhook Lake and the body was secured. . . .

As an introduction to these words the Herald Tribune printed:

Garner P. Roney is a newspaperman by instinct and by virtue of long training in the practices and traditions of his profession. He recovered the body of his only son from a creek near Kinderhook yesterday; but even while he was broken by the greatest sorrow of his life, he realized that the finding of the boy's body was news and that his paper should have it. So he went to the telegraph office and wrote the story for what it was worth as news, wrote it as calmly and as dispassionately as if the boy had been a stranger instead of flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood.

This pathetic action is in the eyes of newspapermen one of the heights of nobility--a height to which all aspire if they should ever be thrust into a similar situation. For them, it ranks with the heroism of the telephone girl who sticks to her post in a fire, is parallel to,the devotion to duty of the old Roman who executed his own son for disobeying military commands.