excerpt
GEORGE PEARSON’S SLICE sent his drive into
the deep rough along the third fairway. Poking
through the underbrush as he and Pearson
searched for the ball, Jeremy Stone thought of
his father and a day on another golf course.
When William Randolph Hearst started the Chicago American in
1900, Jeremy talked himself into a job as a reporter and escaped the
tedium of his family’s bank. Appalled, his father told him, “This is
exciting for you at twenty-two, my boy, but journalism is a low
profession and that man Hearst will lower it further in Chicago. Be
prepared to wade in the scum. Let me know when you’ve had
enough of it.”
After two years of writing about love nests, civic scandals,
tenament fires and murders—the bloodier the better for the American—
Jeremy told his father that he had been right about Hearst ,
but he said newspapering had got into his blood. As they walked
from the 18th hole of the Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton, he told
Zeb Stone that he was going to find a paper of his own. He knew
about a weekly for sale out west, had made inquiries about it and
corresponded with the owner. He was going out to take a look at it.
If it seemed right, he was going to buy it and he and Winifred
would move there and grow the paper with the town. In the clubhouse
dining room, his father told him he had hoped that the
newspaper job was merely an eruption of youthful adventurism. If
he returned to the bank, it would be his one day, his future would
be assured. He questioned Jeremy closely about the paper…
Mayanaam
vequinox
Manolis 