The Journalist

"I abandoned all thought of becoming a professional baseball player and embraced journalism with a hug that took its breath away."

	As a cub reporter for the Columbus Enquirer-Sun, one of his first assignments was a libel trial. "My disillusionment came the next day when I reached the office to find it full of indignant lawyers. Such a fuss! . . . I had the wrong railroad suing, if indeed it was the plaintiff. I had the wrong amount of damages. I had the name of the other litigant wrong. . . . The story was so manhandled that it was impossible to decide which party suffered the greater. Trying to disentangle its ramifications or mistakes, the attorneys finally gave up first in despair and then in disgust. In the end, apparently, it seemed less trouble to forget it than to try to unravel it. This, I suppose, was what saved me." His humorous column, "One Word After Another," ran in the Brooklyn Eagle from 1922-1926. He wrote for the Herald Tribune in 1927, then got another humorous column, "The Roving Reporter," for the New York Evening Post from 1927-1932.

Johnson and other reporters had to live in a tent in the Vermont snow for ten days awaiting the death of President Coolidge's father. Johnson submitted a story about the questionable business practices of Colonel Coolidge and the maddening eccentricities of his deceased brother, Julius Caesar Coolidge. For years afterwards his editor used the story as an example to young reporters of the worst piece of journalistic judgment he'd ever seen.

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