Today's Word—I’ll Drink to That

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NOTE: The WORD today celebrates Repeal Day, the 75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition in 1933. The Demon Rum is occasionally linked to writers and journalists, and this 1887 New York Graphic item also reveals drink as the mother of technological necessity in the newsroom of “Petroleum V. Nasby,” editor and owner of The Toledo Blade.

Necessity Is Mother of Innovation

“The first editor in the United States to throw aside his quill or pencil for the typewriter was D. R. Locke, “Petroleum V. Nasby,” the editor and proprietor of the Toledo Blade. A dozen years ago, when The Cincinnati Gazette and Commercial, Chicago Tribune and St. Louis Globe Democrat were the only Republican journals of any note west of New York, Locke was a power in the newspaper world. The circulation of the weekly edition of the publication founded by Horace Greeley and his ‘Confederate Cross Roads’ letters were widely read and copied. Locke had always been a heavy drinker, but his success seemed only to spar him on to renewed efforts in the anti-prohibition line. He made it a point to get ‘half shot’ before breakfast of a morning, be ‘three sheets in the wind’ by dinner and wind up the evening too full for utterance. Although possessed of an iron constitution, whiskey gradually undermined his nerves, and after a time he was no longer able to hold a pen and turn out legible manuscript. He tried dictation, but his ideas did not seem to fully concentrate in the presence of a second person, and for a time he seriously contemplated reformation. While in such a plight he chance to see a typewriter of the crude style of the day. The thought came to him like a flash that he had found a way out of his dilemma he bought the instrument, and in the course of a few weeks could knock off ‘copy’ as rapidly and far more decipherably than he could with a pen in his most gifted days.”

—The New York Graphic, 1887

Thanks to alert WORDster Dennis Dunleavy, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, who writes: “The article, found in the Ashland, Ore., Daily Tidings of 1887, was reprinted from The New York Graphic. The article tells the story of how humorist and journalism pioneer David Ross Locke, commonly known by his pseudonym ‘Petroleum V. Nasby,’ became the first editor to use a typewriter in the newsroom. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but in Locke’s case it may have been something else all together.”

NOTE: The WORD will be traveling to visit ailing family, so no new wisdom until next Friday (12/12). Be strong.

Today in History
1996: Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan questions stock market overvalue; 1978: USSR and Afghanistan sign "friendship treaty"; 1955: AFL merges with CIO to form largest labor union; 1952: Abbott & Costello Show debuts; 1945: 5 U.S. Navy bombers vanish in Bermuda Triangle; 1933: Prohibition ends; 1876: Hundreds killed in Brooklyn theater fire; 1839: Gen. George Custer's birthday.