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Mortison is not a young upstart country reporter, as your article would suggest. He is a newspaper artist. He went to work in the brass shops up there in Waterbury when he was a kid . . . and worked steadily until he was toolmaker when he was a middle-aged man. Then he felt the call of the wild and moved out to a little town called Prospect and became a chicken farmer. It wasn't altogether the call of the wild. He had to put his wife in a private sanitarium, and had to make more money somehow. Just for fun he became a country correspondent for the Waterbury Republican. You know, they send in a little stickful of who spent the day with whom, and who's shingling his barn. Mort is a humorous bird (despite his animal stories) and he appreciated the flavor of the humorous things that go on in a little town, and would have liked to write them up. But a country correspondent can't do that, so he invented Lester Green.
If one of the neighbors got himself in a ludicrous predicament, and would have been offended if he was written up, Mort wrote a story about Lester Green. Lester was always the goat, and the idea went over big. No one seemed to feel libeled, everyone knew who Lester was batting for and everybody chuckled.
Next Mortison became a cartoonist. I don't know how he did that, I. C. S., I guess, but he is good. The Republican hired him, and he does all the work for the morning, evening and Sun day paper. For quite a while he drove out after work and ran his farm too.
When that silly Marian Talley was touring around and cleaning up before she went back to the farm, she made Waterbury and gave out an interview in which she said she would like to retire with three chickens and a cow. Lester Green sent her the three chickens, express paid to the Metropolitan Opera House, and the A. P. picked up that story, which was Lester Green's start as a national character. And you would be surprised to see his mail now. The funniest thing about Lester Green is that the A. P. took him seriously for a long time. Sometimes they wired for "verification" of some damn preposterous story.
Mortison writes those stories because the city editor of the morning paper likes to have them to put in a box on the front page. No '"copycat" at all, you see.
Last winter I was on the staff of the Sunday Republican in Waterbury and had a desk next to Mortison. The Sunday Editor is one Bill Vosburgh. He is a Yale man, and reads his TIME faithfully. He is a fine boy, too, and has a sharp and humorous tongue. "Well, well, here's the old Copycat. Bill will greet Mortison for the next few weeks, and Mort will grin —he's always good-natured—but I have an idea that your story will really hurt his feelings a little. . . . BARRON C. WATSON
Port Washington, L. I.
Gondola Man
Sirs:
"Spend 'till it Hurts" in your ''Letters" of July 28 and one of the recent daily sermonettes of Calvin Coolidge, are not far apart in their general thought.
Is not the difficulty at the moment, the fact that the general public, not Mr. Coolidge, have done their spending and now it hurts? . . .