Black on White

most striking statements accredited to me as a foreign correspondent were due to clever garbling of the cables by imaginative telegraphists.

The New York World-Telegram, in a piece about the illness of Anthony J. Drexel Jr., head of the Philadelphia banking family, gives his age as 770. (Seven-hundred-and-seventy, in case the typesetter decides to blur the point of the story). If the mistake were traced to its source, we would find, I suspect, a disgruntled, embittered linotypist, with a deep – seated hatred for Rittenhouse Square gentility. The figure 770 was his method of conveying that the Drexels were much too old, much too persistent. It was no mistake at all. It was a protest.

The same is probably true of a headline in the Baltimore Sun, many years ago, which sticks in my memory. Two things had happened that day. Byrd had reached the North Pole, and there had been an uprising in Poland. The two items were so displayed across the top of page one that they read like one piece of news: “Americans Reach North Pole; Poles Revolt.”