Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [28]
At night, Pulitzer retreated to 307 South Third Street, only a few short blocks from the newspaper. There he rented a small room in a boardinghouse run by an aging widow and her two daughters. It was a gloomy two-story building across the street from a bathhouse that gave the block a stench of sulfur. He was, however, in good company. His friend the poet Udo Brachvogel and an editor from the Anzeiger des Westens also took rooms there. The three of them often sat together, talking, late into the night.
Joseph’s brother Albert, however, was still a wandering soul. After his stint selling magazines door to door, Albert had taken a tutoring job on a German farm and had taught German in the St. Louis schools. In late spring of 1868, he walked into a wealthy neighborhood south of his brother’s home and came across a group of boys sitting on the steps of one of the more handsome houses on the block. Albert asked a passerby whose house it was and learned that it belonged to Thomas Allen, president of the Iron Mountain Railway and a figure of considerable political influence in St. Louis.
“In my desperate lonely position,” Albert said, “I cast to the winds all timidity, boldly walked up to the doorstep.” He asked if Allen was home. To his amazement he was led into the house. “I stammered out that I knew German and might teach the German language to those bright boys I had seen on the doorstep.” Allen said the idea appealed to him but he and his family were leaving to spend the summer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. “Though I did not have the faintest idea where Pittsfield might be, I, nothing daunted, intimated as well as I could in broken English that I would be delighted to wend my way Pittsfield-ward.”
It turned into an idyllic summer. Each day after concluding his tutoring lessons, Albert, armed with an English-German dictionary, worked his way through Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. When the group returned to St. Louis, he spoke a passable form of English. Back at the Mercantile Library, he had a fortunate encounter with a member of the Hegelians who had become superintendent of the public schools. The man had received an inquiry from a school in Leavenworth, Kansas, that was looking for a German teacher. The $100 monthly salary was a princely sum for an eighteen-year-old. But Albert was not successful at the job and was soon returned to St. Louis. Deciding he was not cut out for teaching, he set his sights on entering his brother’s field.
This new plan did not sit well with his older brother. Pointing out that Albert was never without a copy of Dickens or Shakespeare in his hands, Joseph instead suggested that a literary career would be more suitable. “Think, Albert, how proud our mother would be,” he said. “You are too much of a dreamer ever to make any money for the family. Leave the commercial grind to me.”
Ignoring Joseph’s advice, Albert headed to Chicago, where, he heard, the Illinois Staats-Zeitung was hiring. Astonishingly, without any newspaper training, he duplicated Joseph’s luck at getting a job on the Westliche Post and landed a reporter’s position at $10 a week. “The Staats-Zeitung, however, although printed in German, was an excellent school for me, since four-fifths of its new matter was drawn from English-speaking sources. I had perforce to know English first.” The paper shared a building with the Chicago Evening Post, whose reporters gave him yet more opportunity to work on his English. “His object,” recalled one reporter, “was to master the language so that he could take a writing position on an English paper, and he told me that when he felt sure of himself in this respect he should go to New York and begin there.”
In November 1869, advertisements appeared in the Westliche Post, and other newspapers, announcing a special election in the Fifth and Sixth districts