The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism

14. A Titanic Scoop

14 A Titanic Scoop On the morning of Wednesday, April , , Carlos F. Hurd, a slender, professionally dressed man in his thirties, made his way through the thick crowd of men who milled around Park Row each day. The brims of a thousand hats registered an identical backward tilt as their proprietors gazed upward to read the headlines posted on tall blackboards hanging from the second story of Pulitzer’s World and Hearst’s Journal buildings. There, racing back and forth on balconies, men from the newspapers tried to offer up the latest news, one step ahead of each other. During the past four decades, as the telegraph and telephone revolutionized the transmission of news, reading the bulletins had become a fashionable New York pastime. One of the earliest such gatherings had occurred twenty-six years before when the World erected a tableau across the front of its building depicting an ocean scene, complete with a lighthouse, and raced two miniature yachts across the panorama as each dispatch arrived from the America’s Cup race between the Mayflower and the Gallatea taking place in England . Seven years later, , people filled Park Row and City Hall Park to ‘‘watch’’ the heavyweight championship of the world being fought , miles away in Carson City, Nevada. The World had built a reproduction of the boxing ring on a platform outside its building, seeking to outdo its competitors’ bulletin boards. To the joy of boxing fans, four-foot-tall string puppets reenacted the blows in the fourteen-round bout from telegraphic reports. At the end of the match, the Tills, renowned marionette operators, even provided an encore of the final round.1 As Hurd passed through the crowd, just as Chapin had two decades earlier when he had arrived from Chicago, he approached the gold-domed World building like a pilgrim would a holy shrine. Time had robbed the remarkable building of its claim as the tallest structure in New York, and certainly diminished its status as the most idiosyncratic. Within a year, that prize would be incontestably snatched away and retained for the next two decades by the -foot, Gothic-style Woolworth building rising across the park. But for an out-of-town reporter like Hurd, the World remained Gotham’s most recognizable building. The stars at the World were well known to Hurd. Copy from the best of them ran frequently in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he had worked since . The son of a congregational minister, Hurd was born in Cherokee, Iowa, in  and began his journalism career at the Springfield Leader in  after graduating from Drury College in Springfield, Missouri. The next year, he moved to St. Louis, then the nation’s fourth-largest city, and soon thereafter joined the Pulitzer empire. Hurd had come to New York after securing a two-month leave from the paper to take a long-awaited tour of Europe. He and his wife Kathleen had sent their two children to stay with their grandmother and had arrived by train the night before. Emerging from the crowd, Hurd entered the World building. His goal was to see Chapin. All reporters knew of Chapin, but those from St. Louis were often weaned on Chapin stories dating from his years there. In any case, Hurd had worked under Chapin for a brief time in .2 As usual, alas, Chapin had little time or patience for such callers as Hurd. ‘‘I was so busy that I could spare but a few minutes to chat with him,’’ said Chapin. The audience was over as soon as it started. Hurd scarcely had time to tell the irascible editor anything beyond the fact that he was in New York to catch the R.M.S. Carpathia of the British Cunard Line. Shoptalk would have to wait for another meeting. Disappointed, Hurd exited the city room and presumably toured the pressroom before leaving. No one came to the World without seeing its presses, a string of Hoe & Company machines, any one of which could run off the  A Titanic Scoop  The Rose Man of Sing Sing entire circulation of a small city newspaper in an hour. When running at full tilt, their rhythmic beat could be felt  feet above in the noise-proofed sanctum Pulitzer had built under the cupola at the very top of the twenty-story building. The smell of ink, the sound of the bell...