Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/417



needs such a newspaper as yours, and if you ever need help, come to me." It was the same Coates who helped Nelson raise the funds to purchase the first web perfecting press used by The Star. Years later a manager of a local theater complained about the treatment given him by The Star and threatened to with- draw his advertising unless a change was made. Nelson gave the change when he replied, "Out you go and out you stay!" a decision he never reversed.

These two incidents, selected from many much more spec- tacular, explain what Collier's Weekly meant when it said in an obituary notice, "The founder and editor of The Kansas City Star took his place in journalism's Hall of Fame by kicking in the door with hobnailed boots." Nelson, himself, expressed the same idea, but more moderately, when he asserted, "I've tried to be gentle and diplomatic, but I've never done well in my stocking feet." He was one of those men to whom reference has already been made in this chapter as being great editors and good business executives. By means of The Star he pulled Kan- sas City out of the mud, for there were "no pavements and only a few plank sidewalks" when he arrived, and made it a city of parks and boulevards.

The Star, it may be remarked in passing, secured the inter- view with General Nelson A. Miles which led to the condemna- tion of the army supplies used in Cuba in the war with Spain. The Star, through the liberality of its readers, did much to re- lieve the starving people of Matanzas, Cuba.

OTIS OF LOS ANGELES

Harrison Gray Otis became editor and owner of The Los An- geles Times, Los Angeles, California, on August 1, 1882. The paper had been started on December 4, 1881, and grew out of a weekly which bore quite a different name The Mirror. The latter paper had been started in 1873 as a little "thumb-nail journal" by the owners of a second-hand job plant in the hopes that the sheet might bring business to the office.

On August 5, 1890, there began in the office of The Times, be- tween its owner and the local typographical union, a struggle which stretched over a period of nearly two decades. The strike