I feel obliged to describe this cubbyhole.
It had a single porcelain stall and but one cabinet for the chairing of the bards.
It was here that the terror-stricken Dennis Moon played an unrehearsed role during the children's party.
A much larger room, adjacent to the lavatory, served as a passageway to and from the skimpy toilet.
That unused room was large enough for -- well, say an elephant could get into it and, as a matter of fact, an elephant did.

Something occurred on the morning of the children's party which may illustrate the kind of trouble our restricted toilet facilities caused us.
It so happened that sports writer Arthur Robinson got out of the hospital that morning after promising his doctor that he be back in an hour or two to continue his convalescence.
Arthur Robinson traveled with the baseball clubs as staff correspondent for the American.
He was ghost writer for Babe Ruth, whose main talent for literary composition was the signing of his autograph.
Robbie was a war veteran with battle-shattered knees.

He arrived on crutches at the Newspaper Club with one of his great pals, Oliver Herford, artist, author, and foe of stupidity.
Mr. Herford's appearance was that of a frustrated gnome.
He seemed timid (at first ,) wore nose glasses from which a black ribbon dangled, and was no bigger than a jockey.
Robinson asked Herford to escort him to the club's lavatory before they sat down for a highball and a game of cards.
In the jakes, after Robbie and his crutches were properly stowed, Mr. Herford went to the adjoining facility.
He had barely assumed his stance there when a fat fellow charged through the doorway.
Without any regard for rest-room protocol, the hulking stranger almost knocked Herford off his pins.
The artist-author said nothing, but stood to one side.
He waited a long time.
Nothing was said, nothing accomplished.
The unrelieved stranger eventually turned away from the place of his -- shall we dare say his Waterloo?
-- to go to the door.

Mr. Herford touched the fat man's arm.
"Pardon me, sir.
May I say that you have just demonstrated the truth of an old proverb -- the younger Pliny's, if memory serves me -- which, translated freely from the archaic Latin, says, 'The more haste, the less peed'".

Governor Alfred E. Smith was the official host at the children's party.
United States Senator Royal S. Copeland was wearing the robes of Santa Claus and a great white beard;
the Honorable Robert Wagner, Sr., at that time a justice of the New York Supreme Court, was on the reception committee.
I was in charge of the arrangements -- which were soon enough disarranged.

I had had difficulties from the very first day.
When, in my enthusiasm, I proposed the party, my city editor (who disliked the club and many of its members) tried to block my participation in the gala event.
Even earlier than that he had resented the fact that I had been chosen to edit the club's Reporter.

City editor Victor Watson of the New York American was a man of brooding suspicions and mysterious shifts of mood.
Mr. Hearst's telegraphic code word for Victor Watson was "fatboy".
The staff saw in him the qualities of a Don Cossack, hence, as mentioned before, his nickname "the Hetman".

The Hetman's physical aspects were not those of a savage rider of the steppes.
Indeed, he looked more like a well-fleshed lay brother of the Hospice of St. Bernard.
Nor were his manners barbaric.
He had a purring voice and poker player's immobility of features which somehow conveyed the feeling that he knew where all the bodies were buried.
He was the son of a Scottish father and an American Jewish mother, long widowed, with whom he lived in a comfortable home in Flushing.
He had worked in the newspaper business since he was nineteen years old, always for the Hearst service.
From the very first he regarded himself as Mr. Hearst's disciple, defender, and afterward his prime minister, self-ordained.

It was said that the Hetman plotted to take over the entire Hearst newspaper empire one day by means of various coups: the destruction of editors who tried to halt his course, the unfrocking of publishers whose mistakes of judgment might be magnified in secret reports to Mr. Hearst.
Whatever the Hetman's ambitions, his colleagues were kept ill at ease.
Among the outstanding members of the Hearst cabinet whom he successfully opposed for a time were the great Arthur Brisbane, Bradford Merrill, S.S. Carvalho, and Colonel Van Hamm.
He also disliked Runyon, for no good reason other than the fact that the Demon's talent was so marked as to put him well beyond the Hetman's say-so or his supervision.

Runyon, for his part, had a contemptuous regard for Mr. Watson.
"He's a wrong-o", said Runyon, "and I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw the Statue of Liberty".

Arthur "Bugs" Baer wrote to me just recently, "Vic wanted to die in harness, with his head towards the wagon.
He supported his mother and his brother, who afterwards committed suicide.
Watson told me that his brother always sent roses to his mother, blossoms bought with Vic's allowance to him.
'And would you believe it', Vic added, 'she likes him better than she does me.
Why'"?

About the only time the Hetman seemed excited was when one of his own pet ideas was born.
Then he would get to his feet, as though rising in honor of his own remarkable powers, and say almost invariably, "Gentlemen, this is an amazing story!
It's bigger than the Armistice".

Some of the Hetman's "ideas" were dream-ridden, vaguely imparted, and at times preposterous.
One day he assigned me to lay bare a "plot" by the Duponts to supply munitions to a wholly fictitious revolution he said was about to occur in Cuba.
He said that his information was so secret that he would not be able to confide in me the origin of his pipeline tip.

"I can tell you this much", he said.
It's bigger than the Armistice".

I worked for a day on this plainly ridiculous assignment and consulted several of my own well-informed sources.
Then I spent the next two days at the baseball park and at Jack Doyle's pool parlors.
When I returned to make my report, the Hetman did not remember having sent me on the secret mission.
He was busy, he said, in having someone submit to a monkey-gland operation.
And I was to go to work on that odd matter.
I shall tell of it later on.

The Hetman had a strong liking for a story, any story which was to be had by means of much sleuthing or by roundabout methods.
Most of my stories were obtained by simply seeking out the person who could give me the facts, and not as a rule by playing clever tricks.

One day I tired of following the Hetman's advice of "shadowing" and of the "ring-around-the-rosie" approach to a report that Enrico Caruso had pinched a lady's hip while visiting the Central Park monkey house.
I explained my state of mind to artist Winsor McCay and to "Bugs" Baer.
Mr. Baer obtained a supply of crepe hair and spirit-gum from an actor at the Friars.
We fashioned beards, put them on, and reported to the Hetman at the city desk.

Mr. Baer had an auburn beard, like Longfellow's.
Mr. McCay had on a sort of Emperor Maximilian beard and mustache.
As for myself, I had on an enormous black "muff".
This, together with a derby hat and horn-rim eyeglasses, gave me the appearance of a Russian nihilist.

"We are ready for your next mysterious assignment", said Mr. Baer to the Hetman.
"Where to, sir"?

Mr. Watson did not have much humor in his make-up, but he managed a mirthless smile.
Just then a reporter telephoned in from the Bronx to give the rewrite desk an account of a murder.
The Hetman told me to take the story over the phone and to write it.
While I was sitting at one of the rewrite telephones with my derby and my great beard, Arthur Brisbane whizzed in with some editorial copy in his hand.
He paused for a moment to look at me, then went on to the city desk to deliver his "Today" column.

I thought it expedient to take off my derby, my glasses, and the beard;
and also to change telephones.
I managed to do this by the time the great A.B. returned to the place where he last had seen the fierce nihilist.
He stood there staring with disbelief at the vacant desk.
Then he wrinkled his huge brow and went slowly out of the room.
He had a somewhat goggle-eyed expression.
He had been "seeing things".

The Hetman's "ideas" for news stories or editorial campaigns were by no means always fruitless or lacking in merit.
He campaigned successfully for the riddance of "Death Avenue" and also brought about the ending of pollution of metropolitan beaches by sewage.
He exposed the bucket-shop racket with the able assistance of two excellent reporters, Nat Ferber and Carl Helm.
In the conduct of these and many other campaigns, the Hetman proved to be a much abler journalist than his critics allowed.

It seems to me now, in a long backward glance, that many of the Hetman's conceits and odd actions -- together with his grim posture when brandishing the hatchet in the name of Mr. Hearst -- were keyed with the tragedy which was to close over him one day.
Alone, rejected on every hand, divorced, and in financial trouble, he leaped from an eleventh-floor window of the Abbey Hotel in 1937.

One finds it difficult to pass censure on the lonely figure who waited for days for a saving word from his zealously served idol, W.R. Hearst.
That word was withheld when the need of it seemed the measure of his despair.
The unfinished note, written in pencil upon the back of a used envelope, and addressed to the coroner, makes one wonder about many things: "God forgive me for everything.
I cannot"

Much to Damon Runyon's amazement, as well as my own, I got along splendidly with the Hetman;
that is, until I became an editor, hence, in his eyes, a rival.
Not long after Colonel Van Hamm had foisted me on the Watson staff I received a salary raise and a contract on the Hetman's recommendation.
During the next years he gave me the second of the five contracts I would sign with the Hearst Service.
It was a somewhat unusual thing for a reporter to have a contract in those days before the epidemic of syndicated columnists.
I would like to believe that my ability warranted this advancement.
Somehow I think that Watson paid more attention to me than he otherwise might have because his foe, Colonel Van Hamm, wouldn't touch me with a ten-foot blue pencil.

I remember one day when Mr. Hearst (and I never knew why he liked me, either) sent the Hetman a telegram: "Please find some more reporters like that young man from Denver".
Watson showed this wire to Colonel Van Hamm.
The colonel grunted, then made a remark which might be construed in either of two ways.
"Don't bother to look any further.
We already have the only one of its kind".

The Hetman did have friends, but they were mostly outside the newspaper profession.
Sergeant Mike Donaldson, Congressional Medal of Honor soldier, was one of them.
Dr. Menas S. Gregory was another.
I used to go with Watson to call on the eminent neurologist at his apartment, to sit among the doctor's excellent collection of statues, paintings, and books and drink Oriental coffee while Watson seemed to thaw out and become almost affable.

There was one time, however, when his face clouded and he suddenly blurted, "Why did my brother commit suicide"?

I cannot remember Dr. Gregory's reply, if, indeed, he made one.