'Three Gaudy and Gorgeous Years'

As a newspaper reporter in Ohio, Indiana and upstate New York, part of my job was to cover public meetings. I’ve spent thousands of hours, notebook in hand, trying to stay awake during city and town council meetings, school board meetings, recreation board meetings, and the subcommittee meetings of all of the above. I reached the nadir in a small Ohio city where I covered the monthly assemblies of the Ditch Maintenance Board. I never knew there was so much I didn’t want to know about ditches.

American journalism has given us several of our finest writers; preeminently, A.J. Liebling and H.L. Mencken. Presumably, both men, at some point early in their careers, had to cover their equivalent of the Ditch Maintenance Board. On this date, Feb. 28, in 1901, the Baltimore Morning Herald published Mencken’s account of the city’s most recent Water Board meeting (waterboarding now has other connotations). Mencken was twenty years old and had worked for the Morning Herald, his first newspaper, since the previous year. He would stay there until 1906, when he joined the Sun. The story proves he could perform the mundane tasks expected of a reporter. His prose is clean, if not as witty as his subsequent work, and he manages to spice up his lede while still playing it fairly straight:

“Water Engineer Alfred M. Quick, whose part in the criticism of the municipal subways recently subjected him to a vigorous ‘roast’ at the hands of Subway Engineer Phelps, has evidently become something of a ‘roaster’ himself.”    

Mencken is in his element – the human comedy. Bureaucrats amused him. He performs the well-known reporter’s dodge of transcribing the board’s financial report at length. Half the story is lifted wholesale. Column inches must be filled somehow. Mencken enjoys it when one pack of civic functionaries denigrates another: “In the annual report of the water board, submitted to the mayor yesterday, half of the sentences are burning ‘knocks’ at the board’s predecessors in office. The latter are charged with all sorts of lapses and blunders from extravagance to loose bookkeeping.”

Mencken treasured his apprentice years. In 1898 he had taken a writing class with Cosmopolitan University, an early correspondence school. That was his only formal training in journalism and his only enrollment in higher education. (An interesting book could be written about the accomplished men and women, especially writers, who never went to college or never earned a degree.) In 1927, Mencken published in the Baltimore Evening Sun a retrospective account of his early years as a newspaper reporter. It begins:

“Looking back over a dull life, mainly devoted to futilities, I can discern three gaudy and gorgeous years. They were my first three years as a newspaper reporter in Baltimore, and when they closed I was still short of twenty-two. I recall them more and more brightly as I grow older, and take greater delight in the recalling. Perhaps the imagination of a decaying man has begun to gild them. But gilded or not, they remain superb, and it is inconceivable that I’ll ever see their like again. It is the fate of man, I believe, to be wholly happy only once in his life. Well, I had my turn while I was still fully alive, and could enjoy every moment.”

Few writers wrote so convincingly and amusingly as Mencken about the pleasures and satisfactions of life.