Talk:Everybody's/'Nastasia
Add topic| Information about this edition | |
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| Edition: | Extracted from Everybody's magazine, 1924 March, pp. 37-62. |
| Source: | https://archive.org/details/sim_everybodys-magazine_1924-03_50_3 |
| Contributor(s): | ragpicker |
| Notes: | Accompanying illustrations may be omitted |
| Proofreaders: | ragcleaner |
Ritchie on himself
[edit]From the "Everybody's Chimney Corner" section—"Where Reader, Author and editor Gather to Talk Things Over"—of the magazine.
ROBERT WELLES RITCHIE (“'Nastasia,” page 37) wrote a story at fourteen called “How I Kissed the Blarney Stone” and a few years later was editor of a high-school paper with Jack London working for him. It was natural that he should go into newspaper work and land in New York.
My first newspaper assignment [he writes] was to discover why a young man in Berkeley, California, who always had been tied to his mother's apron strings, had eloped with the cook; my last was to see something of the Great War in Belgium and the aftermath of war in London. In between—and it was a span of eighteen years—such circumstances as the Madero revolution in Mexico, going to Labrador to meet Peary, a ringside seat in Reno, the burning of San Francisco, and Tokyo in the grip of a mob.
Some curious perversity tucked under the outer folds of my to all appearances normal brain dictates that after so many years in the crash and grind of the news—subway accidents in Manhattan and a gas barrage at Audenarde—emancipation turns my inclinations to the opposite pole. I would rather be camping at Tinajas Atlas, the only water-hole in ninety miles of the Desert of Altar, than sitting in the Horseshoe at the Metropolitan—though I never sat there. I have found more fun at a picture show in the capital of Baja California—where the last reel leaves the heroine up to her neck in the death tank and no more reels until the next gasoline from Guaymas, due in a month—more fun there, I say, than in Lucas' restaurant near the Madeleine.
I would rather see—and write about—a sandstorm in that place called “The Little Hell” hard by Sonoita on the Line, than see and write about the coronation of a king in Westminster. I would rather watch the play of colors on spikes of ocatilla down in the desert of Fresnal than the magic lights of Broadway. It's more worth while.