Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [18]
When he wasn’t studying, Pulitzer loved to spend time in a popular chess room off the reading room. Since childhood, he had loved chess, and in the Civil War he had sharpened his skill during his monotonous winter encampment. His play attracted attention. “When he played, everyone in the room hovered about his game and watched it closely,” recalled one young boy. “The attraction, of course, was his superlative playing.”
Among the men who took an interest in the young, studious chess player were Emil Preetorius, one of the owners of the Westliche Post; and non-German professionals such as the lawyer William Patrick, who had an office in a building on Market Street, four blocks south of the library. Patrick soon gave Pulitzer some occasional work serving legal papers and running errands.
Pulitzer quit his post at the Strauss lumberyard when he was passed over for the job of head bookkeeper. “The only thing that stood in his way,” recalled Adalbert Strauss, “was his handwriting which was almost vertical, very large and heavy and at a distance looking a little like Chinese.” After giving up his desk at the lumberyard, Pulitzer became a regular fixture in the Market Street office building, picking up whatever work he could find. “We inferred that he was not making much of a go as his exchequer was concerned and it was a struggle with him,” said a teenager who worked in Jones & Sibley’s drugstore, on the first floor of the building.
By the spring of 1867, Pulitzer felt confident that his future lay in the United States. On March 6, he entered a St. Louis courtroom as a subject of the emperor of Austria and left as an American citizen. Once again, Pulitzer displayed no aversion to deceiving the government. As he had done when he inflated his age to join the Union military, Pulitzer lied about how long he had been in the United States now that he sought to become a citizen. Naturalization law required, among other things, that an applicant reside in the United States for a period of five years before being eligible for citizenship. Pulitzer had been in the country for less than three years. Eight days later, he returned to court and went before the clerk to complete the necessary paperwork, as well as take an oath, to become a notary public. This time, however, there was no need for any deception; the requirements were few.
Pulitzer continued working at his mix of jobs connected with the law offices on Market Street. At one point he accepted the task of recording land deeds for the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad in a dozen counties to the southwest of St. Louis where the railroad planned to build a line to Springfield, Missouri. Following his railroad work, Pulitzer accepted a position as secretary of the Deutsche Gesellschaft, which had provided him with his job at the lumberyard the previous year. Now it was his turn to locate work for new immigrants. His work at the library paid off. The new post required that he write letters in English.
After a few months at the immigrant society, Pulitzer learned about a job opening at the Westliche Post. Many of the highly educated and literate German refugees from the 1848 revolution found work in the bourgeoning German press that served the 5 million to 6 million German immigrants with a cultural fondness for reading newspapers. The Westliche Post was owned by two of the city’s most eminent Germans: Carl Schurz, the former Civil War general in whose cavalry Pulitzer had served,