I determined to get a steady job so that I could complete my high school course. There were two country newspapers in the village - The Union, a rather pretentious weekly, and The Review, a smaller sheet, published by Sereno S. Farrington, a man small of stature, and as I learned later, smaller in principal. Recalling the fact that my father had been a printer, I determined to try the Review. Farrington, after sizing me up, admitted that he needed a Devil, but he was skeptical as to my ability and stick-to-itiveness, but finally consented to give me a tryout.

Well, after considerable hard labor, I succeeded in “learning the cases.” At the same time, I made the discovery that Farrington was his own foreman, printer, editor and pressman, etc., and as soon as I learned the cases, I found myself setting most of the 10 point type that went into the little five-column four page weekly, (also four pages of ready printed “patent” insides).

Home press work was done on a big one page platen press, operated by leg power, and I was soon “utilized” for operating this press. The paper had to go through the press four times each week and had to be folded and refolded as each page was printed. The “circulation” was small, but the press work was a strenuous job and generally took most of a ten or twelve hour day before the week’s issue had been completed and mailed.

In remuneration for my labor as a “devil,” printer, pressman, and all around utility servant, I was offered the choice of my board and lodging and ONE DOLLAR per week, or I could provide my own board and lodging and receive two dollars per week for the first six months. Although the picture of boarding with Farrington was not rosy, I tried it out for a week. With “salt rising” bread or a miserable bakery product, stale butter and some other so-called foods of like caliber, one week was a big plenty.

So I constructed a bed with fence boards in one corner of the large office and proceeded to board myself. I remember that the straw tick and a couple of quilts on my fence board bed were not any too comfortable but being young and healthy and generally tired at bedtime, the bed was generally welcome. As for eating, I certainly stretched that two dollars out to the full limit with crackers and cheese, cookies, milk, etc., and once and awhile with a warm meal at the restaurant.

At the end of six months my salary was boosted to the princely sum of three dollars per week. By this time I imagined that I had acquired about all there was to learn in the small print shop. The editor then was in the habit of leaving me for a full week, expecting me to shoulder the job of getting out the paper alone - which I did numerous times. And thus I completed two and a half years with the Review.

I had tentatively agreed to stay with Farrington four years, but his promises of more money were not fulfilled, so I quit and “took to the road” in quest of a better salary. On the way ”west” I worked for a short time at Marshalltown, later found a steady sit on the Boonsboro Herald, a newly launched weekly. Here I worked until the beginning of the next school year, when I entered the ninth grade, boarding at the time with a sister, Mrs. Woodruff, whose husband was a railroad engineer and lived in Boone.

By dint of hard work, I completed the tenth grade.