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8 VAUDEVILLE DAYS, ORCHESTRA NIGHTS For several years after his return from Mexico, Charlie’s hometown Pioneer Press and Dispatch newspapers had been after him to write a drama and music column. He declined again and again. The Pioneer Press’s editor, Herbert R. Galt, ten years his junior but with eighteen years’ experience in journalism, wouldn’t give up. Educated in Baltimore, he became an “accurate and forceful” reporter, joined the St. Paul paper in 1909, and became managing editor four years later. He was a workaholic, seldom away from his office, rarely taking vacations. He would collapse of a heart attack and die at his desk at age forty-five. Behind his bookish, bespectacled appearance was a tough, courageous editor who took controversial stands, such as attacking the death penalty verdicts of Sacco and Vanzetti. Galt and Flandrau were soulmates: combative, opinionated, unintimidated by herd thinking. In the early summer of 1915 Flandrau finally relented. Galt offered only $50 a week, but it wasn’t just the money that appealed to Flandrau. It was the chance to be active and visible again, to be talked about. Given Flandrau’s run-in with Crowinshield, Galt Especially do I like keen, thoughtful and well-expressed criticism with which I entirely disagree. Nothing so instantly and successfully goads you into taking personal stock, understanding yourself and registering values of your own. There is something rather absurd in the airing of one’s personal opinions in public . . . everyone who makes a practice of commenting on, and endeavoring to appraise the works of others, is bound periodically to ask himself: “Who cares?” . . . The queer part of it, however, is that apparently a great many persons do care, and it does make considerable difference. Charles M. Flandrau, St. Paul Dispatch, March 8, May 8, 1920 probably wisely agreed to let all of his columns bypass the copydesk. Charlie could have an office downtown at the paper or, if time permitted , could write from the comfort of his home. It required only three or four reviews a week, September through May — concerts, opera, stage plays, and his favorite: vaudeville. “It will be hard work at first,” he wrote Patty, “as I never had anything to do with journalism, but I look forward to it with considerable interest. The dramatic part will be comparatively easy, but the musical side of the thing will necessitate a good deal more study — and a hideous amount of bluff. There will probably be much more Flandrau than music in my remarks.” That was exactly what Galt wanted. He knew Flandrau’s venomous wit and encouraged him to the limits of libel. The next eight years he wrote hundreds of essays, columns, and reviews (many of which Fitzgerald must have absorbed while home from Princeton) for the morning Pioneer Press and the evening Dispatch , and after that for the competing Daily News. It may have seemed an embarrassing comedown for an essayist of Flandrau’s caliber , but not once did he belittle St. Paul for being St. Paul. Nor did he have an inflated sense of the order of things; his review of Hamlet wasn’t half as important as the report of last night’s four-alarm fire. He took pride in being “local.” The dramatic arts should spring, he felt, from within cities such as St. Paul, not be imposed from without. He knew eastern producers, and the “Broadway farce factories” considered it an “island town.” It made him all the more determined to defend his city’s honor against eastern “gold bricks” out to exploit the provinces. “I beg to inquire,” he wrote, “if there is any more reason why they should get away with lies about their goods than other merchants dependent on the patronage of a more or less intelligent public .” The success of drama depended on establishing genuine community theater. He was frequently invited to review these earnest local efforts. For once in his life he couldn’t bring himself to be candid with his neighbors for fear of being deemed ill-tempered and arrogant . So he treated them as agreeable social occasions, taking pen in hand and then lying “as a gentleman in the course of a lifetime so frequently must.” He called his newspaper work “hasty, slapdash,” but, as always, he was his own worst critic. Working late at night against early-morning deadlines, he acquired the odd habit of writing with a towel around his head, sometimes with a...

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