Genius in Disguise

by Thomas Kunkel

  Mitchell told Ross the story and gave him the book. The editor was amazed, then began to laugh.

  “My Uncle John was a sly old man,” said Ross, “and he liked to stir up trouble. He always kept out of trouble himself, but he would look pious and stay on the sidelines and egg others on. He didn’t belong to a church, and he had a low opinion of preachers in general, but he took a lot of interest in religious affairs. There was nothing he enjoyed so much as a religious controversy—a fight in a congregation, or something like that. He’d watch the fight, and keep it going, and if it died down he’d find some way of starting it up again. Well, he’s the first person in my family who ever amounted to anything. From now on, when I hear people bragging about their ancestors, I’m going to claim that an uncle of mine was partly responsible for the Pillar of Fire movement. That’s something they can’t take away from me.”

  Ross took home Looking Back from Beulah and reported to Mitchell that he enjoyed it as much as any book he’d ever read. “She doesn’t write quite as well as Cardinal Newman,” Ross said, “but she’ll do.”

  ——

  George Ross, like many Aspenites, held on to the slender hope that one day the price of silver would rebound, and Aspen with it. The recovery never happened. By 1901, the Rosses, broke and without prospects, had had enough. That spring, after Harold finished out the third grade (despite what he told Margaret Harriman, he was eight, not six, at this time), the Rosses sold their house at a big loss and left town. After residing briefly in tiny Redcliff, and then Silverton in southwest Colorado, the family finally settled on Salt Lake City as its permanent destination. Why they chose Salt Lake is not really clear. It appears that another of George’s siblings may have owned a store there at the time, and so perhaps had bragged about the town’s prosperity. Certainly what would have appealed to George, after eight marginal years as a grocer, was the fact that the copper mining in Salt Lake was going strong, and there were plenty of opportunities for enterprising men in related trades. Though founded by Mormons, Salt Lake at the turn of the century contained many non-Mormons and was, in fact, one of the West’s more wide-open cities.

  Whatever his reasons, George Ross went ahead alone to Utah to get established, then sent for his wife and son. The move was traumatic for Harold, beyond the normal trauma any child experiences at leaving behind friends, pets (in Harold’s case a shepherd dog named Sam), and the only world he has known. As the Rosses’ stage-coach was navigating a mountain pass, a sudden storm blew up; the coach slid off the road and crashed. A fellow passenger was killed, and Harold was badly roughed up, sustaining many cuts and bruises. Years later, when he was sporting a distinctive three-inch pompadour, Ross liked to say it was the stagecoach accident that caused his hair to start growing straight up.

  George Ross at first worked in and around Salt Lake’s mining trade, turning up in the annual city directories variously as “carpenter,” “miner,” “molder.” Within a few years he moved into general contracting, and as a sideline he began doing demolition work. Then in 1911 he formally established the business that would occupy him the rest of his life. The Ross Wrecking Company was a house-demolition and scrap enterprise, although it’s clear George Ross was willing to do almost anything to bring in a few dollars, including stabling horses and selling kindling. But the company specialized in used building materials: “We Buy and Sell Everything,” it advertised. House wrecking made the Rosses no wealthier than did silver mining or selling meat, but evidently it did afford a good living. They were able to buy a home, at 622 Elizabeth Street, on a high hill over-looking the city; George became a Mason and a respected businessman; and the family was even able to take a trip back to New York. It’s not known what the purpose of this trip was—perhaps to pick up or drop off another of George’s migrating siblings—but merely having the wherewithal to travel so far as a family is some indication of their relative prosperity.

  It took Harold some time to adjust to Salt Lake. The stagecoach accident had complicated matters, of course, but so did Harold’s emerging shyness. The young Ross was gangly and awkward, self-conscious, and constantly fidgeting. He was also terribly bright and rather inventive; for instance, it was said he outfitted his bedroom with contraptions to open the windows automatically. But Harold was, above all, headstrong. Increasingly he argued with his father—Ross always said they were too much alike—and he got into the habit of running away from home.

  The boy was a voracious reader, feeding his emerging sense of wonder with biographies and tales of adventure and romance. He carefully followed the Russo-Japanese War of 1904—1905 in the newspapers and magazines, being intrigued especially with the accounts of correspondent Frederick Palmer of Collier’s. But his interest waned in what he considered mundane school subjects, like mathematics or science, and he often played hooky. One day when Ida Ross was informed of her son’s truancy, she set out after him, only to be relieved when she found him in the public library, absorbed in The Luck of Roaring Camp, by one of his favorite writers, Bret Harte—who, Harold pointed out ominously, had quit school at thirteen. It’s difficult to say just how wide a rift developed between the rebellious teen and his father, but Salt Lake’s directory for 1907 indicates that at fourteen Harold was residing away from the family in a boarding-house. The following year, however, he was back home.

  It was during this difficult adolescence that several events pushed Ross toward his eventual life’s work. In the fall of 1904, when Harold was just shy of twelve years old, he entered Salt Lake’s old West High School. (Ross was always big for his age, and in the family’s moves Ida had managed to advance him one grade.) As a freshman he joined the staff of the school newspaper, The Red and Black. Also on the paper, three grades ahead of Harold, was John Held, Jr., the artist who in the Twenties created the ubiquitous symbol of the Jazz Age, the flapper, and whose comic woodcuts were among the most distinctive features of the infant New Yorker. Ross and Held became friends and, beyond their work for the school paper, participated in an innovative apprentice journalism program at the Salt Lake Tribune. For a dollar or two a week, dozens of high-school-age reporters fanned out across the city to gather news items, which were collected and published the following Sunday. It was Ross’s first exposure to newspapering, and he was smitten. He began to hang around the paper so much that the older men more or less adopted him. As they slipped off after midnight to play cards and drink, they let their enthusiastic young charge “cover” the police beat for them, and he thrilled to ride along on their emergency calls. If the sports editor had need of a local fighter, he had Harold make the rounds of the saloons—once he ran into his own father—until the pug was found. Then there was the time, Held recalled, when the young Ross was sent into the Stockade, Salt Lake’s red-light district, to interview one of its more flamboyant madams, Helen Blazes. Ross was familiar with the district from his days as a delivery boy for a local drugstore, but now he was there as a working journalist. Not wishing to give offense, he was on his best behavior, still wearing his uniform pants from school and carefully couching his questions in the most delicate euphemisms. At last Ross’s politesse got on Miss Blazes’s nerves. “Jesus Christ, kid, cut out the honey. If I had a railroad tie for every trick I’ve turned, I could build a railroad from here to San Francisco.”

  Ross’s attention to schoolwork, always tenuous, began to erode in direct proportion to his newspaper activity. As he said, “I had accumulated so many miles of walking the path for punishment that it was hopeless to remain in school.” A love of pranks, which he indulged all his life, proved a turning point. Toward the end of his sophomore year, he set off a stink bomb (“a vile smelling chemical,” he said) in the manual-training room and was invited to leave school. “But the real trouble,” he would explain later, “was that I was bitten by the newspaper bee, and I spent more time hanging around the police station than I did attending classes.”

  At this point, Ross either ran away to his uncle Jim in Denver or was sent th
ere by his angry parents. (In recounting his childhood, which Ross enjoyed doing, he typically offered slightly different variations on a theme.) Through his uncle’s connections, he worked briefly as an errand boy at the Denver Post. He returned home determined to quit school and be a real newspaperman, and eventually he wore his parents down. He would always remember the day they consented as one of the happiest of his life.

  So rather than return for his junior year, Ross became an apprentice reporter for the Salt Lake Telegram, then owned by the Tribune. His precocity notwithstanding, he learned the trade from the ground up. His first job was as a legman, a reporter who gathered the facts of a story but turned them over to a more experienced colleague to write up. He wrote obituaries, still the dispiriting proving ground for aspiring journalists. In time he was trusted to do his own feature stories. More significant, he was coming under the charismatic spell of a colorful, and now long-extinct, fraternity, that of the tramp newspaperman. A tramp was a freelance reporter who, in the early years of the century, more or less rode an erratic circuit, not unlike an itinerant preacher. He worked at one paper for a few weeks or months, until he was no longer needed or himself felt the urge to move on. Tramp newspapermen were common in the West, and their number swelled predictably every year as they migrated toward California ahead of the winter. Ross was transfixed by their fabulous, often fabulist, tales and by the glamorous prospects of life on the road.

  After several years of this, Ross decided it was time to see what he’d been missing. In 1908 he and an older boy set off for California. After stopping in Morrison to visit Ross’s uncle John, the pair moved south to Albuquerque, New Mexico. There Ross’s companion absconded with their money, leaving Ross to hobo his way alone to California. Hopping the infrequent freight train but mostly walking, Ross got as far as Needles, in the broiling Mojave Desert. There he found work as a timekeeper—the person on a construction site who keeps track of everyone’s hours, a task he had done for his father. When he had enough money to buy a new suit of clothes, he returned (by first-class train this time) to Salt Lake.

  He would not stay long. As it had his father so many years before, wanderlust had taken hold of Harold Ross. Sometime in the latter half of 1910 he bounded aboard a train, knowing only that it was headed west.

  CHAPTER 2

  TRAMP

  On a clear Sunday morning in March 1911, some three dozen anxious people crowded onto a smallish gasoline-powered freighter, the Sioux, which was docked on the Feather River in tiny Nicolaus, California, just north of Sacramento. The short trip they were about to make, upriver to Marysville, would take only a few hours, but there was a great deal more at stake than a diverting excursion. The passengers were rivermen, engineers, business leaders, the merely curious, and a handful of newspaper reporters. Representing the Marysville Appeal was H. W. Ross, as his byline had it, a gangly, gawky man-child of eighteen.

  Marysville had a problem: it was a river town whose river had silted up, useless, from years of unrestrained hydraulic mining. This had the effect of marooning Marysville from Sacramento (and therefore San Francisco), and put its future directly into the unwelcome hands of the railroads. With the mining finally shut down, there was new cause to think the Feather might again accommodate big steamers, but it all depended on whether the Sioux—which, though small, had a deep draft—could make it all the way upriver without getting stuck. As Ross summed it up in the Appeal two days later, “The renavigating of the Feather is one of the most important moves in the history of Marysville—probably the most important.… When boats are again running shippers will not be at the mercy of the railroads.” And beyond the obvious business ramifications, Ross reminded his readers, there were “unbounded” social possibilities: “The excursion of the future will not be made in a small launch with a dozen or so passengers, nor in a fifty- or sixty-foot pleasure craft—but it will be possible for excursion boats carrying hundreds of passengers to ply between this city and Sacramento—yes, even to [San Francisco] bay.”

  The news that day, as duly reported by H. W. Ross, was good: the Sioux had been unimpeded. The Appeal signaled the importance of the story not only with big headlines and top-of-the-page treatment, but by attaching Ross’s byline to it. At this time in American journalism, a byline—the writer’s name at the beginning of a story—was rare, for the most part reserved for articles of real significance or distinction. This is just one of the reasons it is difficult to follow the zigzag, vaporous trajectory of Ross’s newspaper career; he left behind little telltale evidence, even at those papers where he is known to have worked. Between the time he left Salt Lake and the spring of 1917, when he enlisted in the army, Ross the tramp reporter worked at so many newspapers—about two dozen—and usually for such short durations that before long he himself couldn’t reconstruct the bewildering itinerary precisely. Not entirely in jest he would say later, “If I stayed anywhere more than two weeks, I thought I was in a rut.” Documented stopovers included San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Rosa (at the Republican, whose politics, Ross was amused to discover, were Democratic, while its rival, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, leaned Republican), Pasadena, Panama, New Orleans, Atlanta, Brooklyn, and Hoboken, New Jersey. It appears he also worked in Arizona and New Mexico, and at one or both of the major wire services of the day, the Associated Press and the United Press.

  As it happened, one of Ross’s most significant assignments turned out to be one of his first, at the Marysville Appeal. Small as it was (population 6,000), Marysville at this time supported two daily newspapers. The editor of the Appeal was John H. Miller, a likable, sympathetic man and a widely respected journalist whose career had rubbed up against that of another California newspaperman, Mark Twain. Ross would have been aware of Miller’s reputation, and not long after he left Salt Lake he bounded into Marysville and persuaded the editor to take him on as the Appeal’s lone full-time reporter.

  There was genuine affection between Miller, who was sixty-two, and his teenaged protégé. In a short time Miller taught the eager young man a great deal about the down-and-dirty newspaper arts, and Ross, for his part, was a quick study. He had to be, merely to survive the grueling regimen. The Appeal published six days a week, eight pages a day. Since it specialized in local news (said one headline: BEGGARS HAVE COME TO TOWN) and competed with the evening paper for readers, exhausting hours were required to report and write enough material to fill that maw.

  Ross’s account of the Sioux expedition is less interesting for what it is—a straightforward, inelegant, and predictably boosterish piece of work—than for what it reveals about the apprentice himself. First, one is struck by an uncommon seriousness of purpose in one so young. Beyond that, Ross’s story is fully reported, providing perspective and demonstrating an impressive grasp of the shipping trade. Of most interest, however, is early evidence of what Rebecca West would describe as Ross’s “clear, hard, classical American style” of writing: a formal syntax, a rigid (rather than conversational) tone, and the directness and clarity he would later demand as an editor. Read this, the opening phrase from his first sentence—“The fact that the Feather is navigable, and henceforth will be open to steamboat communication the year round, was undisputably proven Sunday”—and it is clear that John Miller had no more use for ambiguity than did Ida Ross.

  Five weeks after Ross wrote that story, Miller took ill. He was hospitalized in Sacramento but died on May 31. Out of respect (if not out of printer’s inertia), Miller’s name remained on the newspaper’s masthead until June 3. Then, on June 6, it is replaced with this: “H. W. Ross, Editor.” Still learning the finer points of eluding railroad Pinkertons and scarcely old enough to shave, Ross suddenly found himself in charge of a daily newspaper. Almost certainly he gave himself the battlefield promotion, but he had little choice: when Miller died, the Appeal’s owner, Colonel E. A. Forbes, adjutant general of the state of California, was traveling on military business. At the time it all must have been a little terrifying, but two d
ecades later Ross recalled the episode with the newspaperman’s sangfroid: “Someone had to edit the paper. The only part I couldn’t do was write the editorials—we got a man for that and I did the rest.”

  However he managed, Ross didn’t do badly. Under its new editor the Appeal was just as newsy as before, and perhaps a little edgier as the chamber-of-commerce tincture faded. Certainly he did a workmanlike job under difficult circumstances. Even so, after two months Ross’s name disappeared from the mast without explanation. Whether the colonel was dissatisfied with Ross or, quite reasonably, wanted an editor of slightly more experience isn’t known.

  It’s also just possible that Ross decided two months was enough management to last him for a while. From Marysville it is thought he made the short trip west to take in a few haunts of his current idol, Jack London: Santa Rosa, in the idyllic Sonoma Valley, and San Francisco. From there it was back to the Central Valley and the Sacramento Union, where his city editor was Kenneth Adams, who became Ross’s friend and later worked with him on The Stars and Stripes. Adams shared Ross’s fondness for pranks and one day caught him in a beauty. For a feature story, he assigned Ross to stow away aboard a Southern Pacific freight train crossing the Sierra Nevada. Ross accepted with alacrity, unaware that Adams in the meantime had tipped off a friendly sheriff to the stunt. Shortly after midnight outside Auburn, California, deputies intercepted the train and hauled Ross, hands skyward, out of his cozy boxcar. Tossed into jail, he proclaimed his innocence to no avail. When he finally persuaded his jailers to telephone the Union, Adams denied knowing him, at which point Ross realized he’d been had. Rather than sulk, he decided to play the role for all it was worth. The next morning when Adams’s sheriff friend asked the jailer how Ross was getting along with his cellmates, all petty offenders, the jailer replied, “He’s got them convinced that he’s wanted in Salt Lake City for three murders.” Back in Sacramento, he signed an account of the adventure “Hobo Ross,” a sobriquet that, to his regret, stuck for years.