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"Letters from a Docent" by Dr. John W. Quinley. ENJOY!
Dr. John W. Quinley, a retired college administrator and faculty member, was raised in Maywood, Illinois, just a few blocks away from where Sandburg lived 30 years earlier. He served as a docent for Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site for several years, and is the author of Discovering Carl Sandburg: The Eclectic Life of an American Icon (2022). He and his wife, Melissa, live in Hendersonville, North Carolina, just a few miles from Sandburg's former home. _______________________________________________________
#2 22 January 2024
Carl Sandburg at the Chicago Day Book (1913) Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site, CARL 13820
Before the Chicago Daily News By John W. Quinley
Sandburg is best known
in journalism as an investigative reporter for the
Chicago Daily News.
He worked there for twelve years, intermittently from 1917 to 1932. But his days
with the press started much earlier, and he took on other positions besides
reporting. As a soldier during the
Spanish-American War in 1898, he wrote firsthand accounts from his posting in
Puerto Rico for the Galesburg Evening Mail.
After the war, he wrote, formatted, and edited the Lombard College newspaper and
yearbook. And for a brief time after college, he penned a social interest column
“Inklings and Idlings” for his hometown paper. After leaving Galesburg
for Chicago in 1905, Sandburg worked for a variety of print media:
Unity, a magazine of
the Unitarian Church; To-Morrow,
a small magazine that provided room and board, but no salary;
Lyceumite, a
periodical for platform artists where he was an associate editor and advertising
man; and System: The Magazine of Business,
where his left-leaning ideas got him fired. In 1907, Sandburg
accepted a position with the Social-Democratic Party in Wisconsin where he
authored articles and pamphlets for the party and wrote columns and poems for
the International Socialist Review.
Three years later as the private secretary for the socialist mayor of Milwaukee,
he freelanced articles for three Milwaukee newspapers and became city editor of
the Social-Democratic Herald.
He moved back to Chicago in 1912, where he took a position with
The World,
a socialist daily. But the paper soon folded, and Sandburg was out of a job. He
then worked short-term
for the American Artisan & Hardware Record,
and a Hearst newspaper that he left after
the editors pressured him to slant his writing toward conservative interests.
The most consequential
newspaper position Sandburg held early in his career (1913 to 1917) was as
senior writer for the Day
Book, a progressive newspaper that accepted no
advertising. While the conservative press pushed frugality as the antidote for
the struggles of workers, Sandburg wrote “As wages run in most industries today,
the poor don’t have a chance to know the value of a dollar because they live on
nickels and dimes. They eat fried mush when they need eggs.” At his core, Sandburg was a newspaper man. He worked for over a dozen presses and worked a variety of jobs for newspapers. The requisite research and direct style of news reporting shaped his later writings as poet and historian.
John Quinley is the author of Discovering Carl
Sandburg: The Eclectic Life of an American Icon and is a former docent at
the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina.
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