Time of Our Lives was written by Orrick Johns, copyright
1937. It is about his life and that of his father, George
Sibley Johns. It also contains considerable information about
this family. It was reprinted in 1973. It is out of print,
but copies can be obtained from time to time at Alibris,
ABEBooks, or other used
book services. As I was typing this, I found a number of copies
from $25.00 on up. --SDC
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Forward
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Chapter One
Boyhood in a Missouri river town in the last
century ; The Negroes leave ; Old Jack's stories ; My grandfather,
John Jay Johns, a Mississippi planter transplanted ; His
forbears ; Black Presbyterianism, Southern plus Scotch ;
Uncle Tom Lindsay and the ministers ; He calculates the
millenium ; Ann Durfee, a wise grandmother ; Her Scotch
culture ; My grandfather's farming ; The Missouri river
bottoms ; Trouble with the slaves ; "Hannibal"
; The first McCormic reaper.
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Chapter Two
Border Civil War times ; The German-Americans vs. The Kaintuck-Virginians
; Quantril's bands ; Fight in the churches ; Ann Durfee again
; A childhood catastrophe and a tough doctor ; Adventures
of a boy farmhand ; The girl's college ; Subterfuges for flirting.
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Chapter Three
Efforts at education ; Some post-war schoolmasters ; Kemper's
Family Hell ; Ann Durfee intervenes ; Princeton ; On the Princetonian
staff with "Tommy" Woodrow Wilson ; Rowdy class
of '80 ; Commandeering a Pennsylvania train ; Freshman crew
beats the Varsity ; Early ventures into journalism ; a job
on the Philadelphia News ; Cyrus H. K. Curtis.
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Chapter Four
Back home and the Law ; A newspaper owner at 24 ; Canvassing
in a blizzard ; Small town journalism ; An editor needs his
fists ; Zeal for exposure ; Looking for wider fields ; George
sells the Journal.
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Chapter Five
Joseph Pulitzer's youth and his quick rise ; Pulitzer buys
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ; J. A. Cockerill, brillian
editor ; Cocerill shoots a visitor ; Johns a cub under Cockerill
; One of the first columnists ; Serious ambitions ; A wide
open town in the '80's ; Early campaigns against the gamblers
; Pulitzer's policies ; Reporting with Augustus Thomas ; The
famous Preller trunk murder ; Office pranks.
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Chapter Six
The hotel run ; General Sherman ; His quarrel with St. Louis
; Beecher, and why Beecher swore ; Mark Twain, James G. Blaine
and others ; Johns is fired ; Hunting in Indian Territory.
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Chapter Seven
The climb upward ; A young newspaperman's ideals
; Philosophers and friends ; Sundays in St. Charles ; Captain
McDearmon's daughter ; His household ; My mother ; A young
family ; Writing a book in four nights.
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Chapter Eight
Doubling in dramatic criticism ; Paderewski has an audience
of 27 ; A musical night with Paderewski in Babe Connors' octoroon
house ; Some famous theatre folk ; Clara Morris, Charlie Hoyt,
Bernhardt, Mansfield, Modjeska, James O'Neill. Music: Patti.
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Chapter Nine
Serious personal ambitions ; Editorial writing ; Anonymity
and its cost ; Controversies with Joseph McCullagh ; Hard
hitting in print ; McCullagh and Marse Henry Waterson ; Beginnings
of the fight on the trusts ; Internal dissension on the Post-Dispatch
; Father goes to the Republic ; Some abortive libel
suits ; "Ruining" the Republic (but raising its
circulation) ; Pulitzer wins the P-D back ; Father takes charge
and holds it for thirty years ; The high bicycle.
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Chapter Ten
My brothers and I appear on the scene ; The wanderings of
a small family ; Life on St. Louis streets ; Beginnings of
schooling ; The old Dozier school ; Cabanne place ; Another
childhood catastrophe ; I am laid up for six months ; My brothers
; George's inventive gifts ; Early reading ; Bryan's first
campaign ; The great tornado of '96 ; The street car strike
; Horace's gold adventure ; University of Missouri.
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Chapter Eleven
A story of Boss Butler's ; Johns' fighting campaigns ; Muck-raking
in St. Louis ; Bosses, the "directorate of directors,"
the Big Cinch ; School graft ; The railroad graft ; Bill Phelps
and Bill Stone ; Some brilliant reporters ; O.K. Bovard, Frank
O'Neill, "Red" Galvin ; A freak Mayer ; The bridge
monopoly fight ; Public Utilities ; The silk-stockings get
in.
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Chapter Twelve
Joseph w. Folk and the Post-Dispatch ; Harry Hawes
; O'Neill in New Mexico ; Folk tries to double-cross ; Lincoln
Seffens ; Panics and depressions unrelieved in those days
; Newspapers undertook to make employment ; The Christmas
Festival, an institution for 40 years ; Editorial stategy
saves the World's Fair ; The reporter becomes a veteran ;
Work in New York ; Visiting Pulitzer ; Johns demoted.
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Chapter Thirteen
My first editorship, the Missouri Oven ; Homer Croy,
Harris Merton Lyon ; Too much editorial zeal ; Suspension
; My many jogs ; Jack Paterson, his travels in the west ;
Architecture and Hugh Ferriss ; St. Louis in 1910 ; Reedy
and the Mirror ; Reedy's magnetic influence ; His amazing
marriage -- and death.
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Chapter Fourteen
I get a job as Reedy's dramatic critic ; Plays of the day
; Promising young people ; Zoe Akins, Sara Teasdale, Hugh
Ferriss, and Barney Gallant ; The "Salons" ; A Mississippi
river bohemia ; Bob Minor at 26 ; Aviation in St. Louis.
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Chapter Fifteen
Horatio Seymour and the Post-Dispatch ; Johns and
Woodrow Wilson ; A campus squabble makes a President ; The
campaign of 1912 ; Theodore Roosevelt and father ; Stories
of Frank James, ex-bandit ; Father's last scandalous campaign,
The Francis-Jim Reed affair ; Its reverberations ; Jim Reed.
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Chapter Sixteen
Estrangement between father and son ; Different philosophies
; Adrift between jobs ; Writers and philosophers ; An early
visit to New York ; "Second Avenue," and the Poetry
Society ; Edwin Markham, Joyce Kilmer ; I win a national poetry
prize ; The Chicago Little Theatre and Maurice Browne ; Barney
Gallant, his remarkable career ; Father's first flivver ;
William Vincent Byers ; I get an unusual job in New York.
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Chapter Seventeen
Alexander Konta, romantic boss ; His Wall Street office in
war time ; Hugh Ferris' studio ; New York in 1914 ; Joels
and Ben de Casseres ; Greenwich Village, Flody Dell and "Polly's"
; Celebrities at "Polly's" ; Peggy Baird and marriage
; A surrealist apartment ; Frank Tanenbaum ; Unemployed raids
; Percy Stickney Grant, liberal ; Talks with Alfred Kreymborg
; George Sterling ; The Grantwood "colony" and Others
; Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevns, William Carlos Williams, Robert
Carlton Brown, Manuel Komroff, Man Ray, The "Free verse"
controversy ; Publicity ; Keymborg's contribution to American
literature ; His exquisite art.
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Chapter Eighteen
An American country house ; Woes of a gentleman farmer ;
"Moonshine Min" ; Dispossessed farmers ; A poet
at large ; My brothers ; Art Young and John Reed in St. Louis
; The campaign of 1916 ; A death in the family ; Wartime hysteria
; Father's last visit to Woodrow Wilson.
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Chapter Nineteen
I go to New York ; The year 1919 ; The news writers union
; Reaction ; A job in an advertising agency ; Literature in
the early 'Twenties ; I produce a play ; Skyscraper architecture
; Raymond Hood and others ; Jo Davidson and John D. Rockefeller
; General Coleman Du Pont ; I sail for Italy.
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Chapter Twenty
Trouble at the Port of Naples ; We arrive at Capri ; The
O'Neill villa ; Venice, and a remarkable landlady ; A St.
Francis Centenary Mass ; Pia Ventujol and her stories.
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Chapter Twenty-one
Fascismo, and its decrees in 1926-27 ; Mussolini and the
children ; Persecution in Florence ; The working class in
Florence ; A porter-poet ; the young writers of Florence ;
Pallazzeschi ; Study and travel ; A visit to D. H. Lawrence.
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Chapter Twenty-two
Life on an Italian beach ; Ida Cavallini ; Her friends and
family ; A proposal to marry ; A tragic Russian ; Meeting
with Ezra Pound ; I Go to Geneva ; A talk with father in Geneva.
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Chapter Twenty-three
Paris -- and a clinic in Lyons ; Back to italy ; Capri again
; Llewellyn Powys and Alyse Gregory ; The story of the baron
; The real reason for tourism ; An elaborate proposal ; Appendicitis
under Etna.
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Chapter Twenty-four
A visit to the O'Neills ; Clink and Witter Bynner ; Going
West ; Carmel-by-the-sea ; Caroline's cabin ; Marriage ; Carpentry
; The baby ; Lincoln Steffens and Frederick O'Brien, columnists
; Robinson Jeffers ; A shadow falls ; The Big Sur ; A scene
on the shore ; I go to San Francisco.
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Chapter Twenty-five
A hunger margh in San Francisco ; Talks with Communists ;
I join the party ; The life of an Ishmaelite ; Sam Darcy,
District Organizer ; Labor defense ; The longshoremen ; A
visit to Mooney with Steffens and Dreiser ; J. B. McNarara
; An agricultural strike ; Party life ; I return to Missouri.
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Chapter Twenty-six
St. Louis' small grafters ; Political Amnesty ; A tour of
the Orient ; A Communist in St. Louis ; New York again, with
Bohemia vanished ; The Daily Worker ; The WPA writers
project ; How we worked ; Political wrangling ; A malcontent
; The moral ; Father has the last word.
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