Adventure Magazine Cover — page 9: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

My Adventures with Your Money his shingle as a practising lawyer. Immedi- ately the press bureau secured a cabinet photo of the venerable lawmaker and com- posed a story about his fresh start in life on the desert. The yarn appealed so strongly to Sunday editors of the great city dailies throughout the country that Bullfrog se- cured for nothing scores of pages of price- less advertising in the news columns. The Senator built a home, the story said, on a spot where, less than a year before, desert wayfarers had died of thirst and coy- otes roamed. The interior of the house on the desert was minutely described. Olive- colored chintz curtains protected the bearded patriarch, while at work in his study, from the burning rays of the sun. Old Florentine cabinets, costly Byzantine vases, and matchless specimens of Sévres, filled his living-rooms. Silk Persian rugs an inch thick decked the floors. Venetian- framed miniature paintings of former Presi- dents of the United States and champions of liberty of bygone days graced the walls. Costly bronzes and marble statuettes were strewn about in profusion. Visitors could not help deducing that the Senator thought nothing too good for his desert habitat. The name of Bullfrog exuded from every para- graph of the story; also the name of a mine at the approach to which this desert mansion was reared and in the exploitation of which the press-agent had a selfish interest. The remarkable part of this tale, which was printed with pictures of the Senator in one metropolitan newspaper of great circulation and prestige to the extent of a full page on a Sunday and was syndicated by it to a score of others, was that the only truth contained in it happened to be the fact that the Senator had decided to make Bull- frog his home with a view to working up a law practise. But it was a good story from the Bullfrog press-agent’s standpoint and from that of the Sunday editor, and even the Senator did not blink at it. He recognized it as camp “publicity” of the highest efficiency, as did other residents of Bullfrog. “tie DURING the Manhattan boom, rd ~which followed that of Bullfrog, the = publicity bureau became more ambi- tious. It made a drive at the news columns of the metropolitan press on week days, and succeeded. At that time the Sullivan Trust Company 765 of Goldficld was promoting the Jumping Jack-Manhattan Mining Company. James Hopper, the gifted magazinist, wrote a story in which the names “‘ Jumping Jack” and “Sullivan Trust Company” appeared in almost every other line. It was for- warded by mail to a great daily newspaper of New York and promptly published as news. The yarn told how the man in charge of the gasoline engine at the mouth of the Jumping Jack shaft had gone stark mad while at work and how but for the quick — intervention of the president of the Sullivan Trust Company, who happened to be on the ground, a tragedy might well have been the result. The miner, the story said, stepped into the bucket at the head of the shaft and asked the man in the engine-house to lower him to a depth of 300 feet. Quick as a flash the bucket was let down. When the 200-foot point was reached there was a sud- den stop. With a rattle and a roar the bucket was jerked back to within 50 feet of the surface. ‘Thereupon it was again lowered and quickly raised again, and the operation constantly repeated until the poor miner became unconscious and fell in a jangled mass to the bottom of the bucket. Hearing the miner’s early cries, Mr. Sullivan had gone to the rescue. knocked senseless the man in the en- gine-house and pinioned him. Then he brought up the bucket containing the almost inanimate form of the miner. Turning to the demon in charge of the en- gine, who had now recovered consciousness, Mr. Sullivan cried, “How dare you do a thing like this?” The man responded, ‘‘ His name is Jack, ain’t it?”’ ‘Well, what of it?” roared Mr. Sullivan. “Oh, I was just’ jumping the jack!” chuckled the ‘‘madman.”’ This nursery tale was conspicuously printed in a high-class New York news- paper’s columns as real news. Undoubtedly the reason why the editors allowed it to pass was that it was believed to be true, but above all was cleverly written. SN (ey) part of the Rawhide boom to do any eS writing of consequence or even to suggest particular subjects for stories. It seemed to me that the exciting events of every-day occurrence during the progress I WAS too busy during the early CoOMmicbhook He: CO