Potato Sage

All my life I have been cursed with enthusiasm and with fishlike people to pour water on it.

Hanging those who do not agree with us is about the only experiment in politics we have not tried.

It is a good rule to watch everybody; the honest man may be careless.

As soon as a man acquires fairly good sense it is said he is an old fogy.

Aphorisms like these are what made Edgar Watson Howe famed, first as editor of the Atchison, Kans. Globe, later, since his retirement 23 years ago, as editor and sole contributor to his magazine, E. W. Howe's Monthly, "Devoted to Indignation and Information." Last week, aged 80, Ed Howe composed a few more aphorisms on a new subject--his permanent and complete retirement. Said he:

"I never have had leisure and now I want it. I'm not satisfied with what I write. I am capable of doing better. I never was fit for anything but a country editor, and I'm too old to run a country paper so I'm quitting."

The final issue of E. W. Howe's Monthly, printed like a newspaper but containing nothing except the editor's personal opinions and a two-column bibliography of his books, pamphlets and anthologies, appeared last November. Whether or not he would continue writing for syndicate publication, Editor Howe, sunning his old bones in Miami, was not sure last week. To subscribers--some of whom paid $1 for life subscriptions--he planned to refund the amounts due.

Like Editor Henry Louis Mencken who announced his retirement from the American Mercury last October, Ed Howe was perpetually disgruntled. Born in Treaty, Ind., educated in public schools until he went into a print shop at 12, he began the expression of his general dissatisfaction in 1877 when he founded the Atchison Globe. After a day's work in the Globe office, starting at 7 o'clock in the morning and ending at 4 o'clock when the paper was "put to bed," Editor Howe spent his evenings writing a novel which he called The Story of a Country Town. When publishers refused his book, Editor Howe printed it himself, a page at a time. Mark Twain compared it to the works of Russian realists of whom Ed Howe had never heard. A bleak, bitter biography of himself and his itinerant evangelist father, The Story of a Country Town was a precedent for the school of U. S. fiction whose ablest current practitioner is Sinclair Lewis. More than 100.000 copies have been sold; a first edition is worth $75.

By 1911, Editor Howe was tired of running a small-town daily. Said he: "People bother me. I don't know why Tom Eglinger didn't get his paper night before last and I don't want to be bothered by his complaint." By that time, the Globe was making $30,000 a year. Editor Howe sold it to his staff for $50,000, used the money to buy a farm on the Missouri River which he called Potato Hill. At Potato Hill he promptly resumed his marathon of printed discontent in E. W. Howe's Monthly. Ed Howe wrote his magazine in illegible longhand. One of its first advertisements, for a horse, mule and donkey liniment, appeared regularly for 22 years.

Nicknamed by newspapers "The Sage of Potato Hill," and the "Kansas Diogenes," Ed Howe was not, as such titles suggested, a small-town Jeremiah, muttering philippic nonsense. His autobiography, Plain People, Heywood Broun called "prose of a sort to make every other journalist bite his nails with envy." The Saturday Review of Literature referred to him as the "spiritual legatee of Benjamin Franklin" because of his curt adages and his printshop background. Intelligent Kansans whom Ed Howe last week stopped rebuking for the first time in 60 years approve of him. At a dinner on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Globe, Ed Howe responded to a speech of felicitation by Senator Arthur Capper: "When we're criticized we always have an excuse. Mine is that I'm an editor. Editors are hated more than any other men on earth."

To the rule that humorists are uneasy and irascible in their private life. Ed Howe is no exception. Married in 1875 to a wife who bore him three children, he often found his family, like most of his friends, a burden. Behind their brick home in Atchison he built a two-room house in which he lived alone. Thirty years ago Mr. and Mrs. Howe were divorced.

Unlike his marriage, Ed Howe's children turned out well. James Fomeroy Howe, onetime Asiatic correspondent for the Associated Press, is now with their Washington Bureau. Daughter Mateel (Mrs. Dwight Farnham) lives with Mrs. Howe in Westport, Conn. Seven years ago, a year before Ed Howe received $10,000 from the Saturday Evening Post for his autobiography, Mateel Howe won the Dodd, Mead Pictorial Review $10,000 prize for her novel Rebellion, about a daughter's revolt from a tyrannical father.

More like their father than the others is Son Eugene Alexander Howe who ran the Atchison Globe for twelve years after Ed Howe left, then moved to Amarillo, Tex. to start a chain of papers of his own. His column in the Amarillo News-Globe, The Tactless Texan, has given Gene Howe more than his neighborly nickname "Old Tack.'' He got himself nationally quoted in 1928, when he called Lindbergh "swell-headed . . . simple-minded . . . lucky"; in 1929, when he said that Mary Garden was "so old she actually tottered." When Mary Garden visited Amarillo for the second time, Gene Howe gave a tea for her at which 40 of his Amarillo cronies appeared in frock coats rented from Chicago. She called him "the queerest person I have ever met." Three years ago Gene Howe performed his greatest journalistic coup. An Amarillo lawyer named A. D. Payne, suspected of killing his wife by placing a bomb in their automobile, went to the News-Globe office and asked Editor Howe to find the real culprit. With the aid of the Kansas City Star's crack Crime Reporter A. B. MacDonald, Editor Howe found that the real culprit was A. D. Payne.

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