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is desired. Then your staff man spends half his time plugging nickels into telephone slot machines ahead of the rewrite man frantically pushing his pencil across loose sheets of copy paper and trying to hear above the din of voices and telegraphic apparatus.

Before being initiated into the mysteries of the rewrite system, I had the idea that each office in New York handling a news service of this type had a mammoth staff. There were precisely five on the United Press day desk, handling the local distribution for New York state and New Jersey, tending the cable amplifications and the big stories for all wires. Of course, there were others supervising distribution, but this was the entire writing and reporting staff.

We'll concede this point, thought I, because so much of the rewrite is done from the daily papers without necessitating phone calls or trips out of the office. Now, the Standard News, I reasoned, must depend on itself alone; it must, therefore, have a large office.

But, the Standard News, I have since discovered, is staffed with one city editor and four desk men. And it serves 26 newspapers and news distributing agencies in and around New York. Its reporters are mere voices. Sometimes they materialize on Saturday mornings to call for little white envelopes, but most of them I know by mere vocal inflections. ,There is "Mr. Sin-(pause)-ger of Lou(pause)-gisland City" and "Hrrrumph hum hum Cottrell of HrTrumph hum ha Jersey City" and "Capital S-Stakesing of Capital E-Elizabeth Capital N-New Capital J-Jersey" and "B for black B-r-o-w-n Brown of R for Red R-i-v-e-rt-o-n Riverton," and about 200 more of them, mostly small-town newspaper men.

From early morn until early morn they telephone in, without request, all the principal local happenings as rapidly as they transpire.

Sometimes our four telephones are all going at once, and the only sound that strikes the ear of an intruder is a chorus of "Yap yap yap Go on." ("Yap" is the handy S. N. A. version of the word "yes.") As fast as we take them down we write the stories-that is, until the telephone rings again-on books made of sheets of yellow flimsy and carbons. One of these copies goes to the ticker man and is punched out on a white paper ribbon and run through two tickers serving our entire clientele scattered from the Bronx to Bowling Green and from Brooklyn to Newark, New Jersey. Each take of the story comprises a book and the last paragraph must not be run over on another page, but additional notes should be put in a fresh add. This makes it possible to break in and give precedence to more important items while trans mitting a long report.

The work is almost entirely dependent on the telephone. Half a dozen county court houses and the state capital at Trenton purr or blat or bray their hottest items into weary ears at this end of the wire. We cover Brooklyn better than even the Brooklyn Eagle handles it. We have a man in every police station in the four boroughs outside of Manhattanthe City News takes care of the last mentioned. The minute a man crosses to the east end of Brooklyn bridge, boards a ferry or gets off the subway on the other side of the Harlem river and breaks his neck or a plate glass window he is in our territory.

And all this vast accumulation of events ranging from abandoned babies to murder and sudden death comes trickling in by telephone and goes tickering out on paper rolls.

It's a rapid, efficient system; but think of the slender pocketbooks of the Gresham or Goshen representatives of the Portland papers if the Oregonian, Journal, Telegram and News suddenly installed a system of canned correspondence.