A little off the beaten track today. I mentioned a week or so ago that I had picked up a book titled News is Where You Find It by a journalist that I had never heard of, Frederic William Wile. Wile was born in La Porte IN in 1873 and died in Washington in 1941. The book was published in 1939 and is a memoir, with the first few chapters devoted to his childhood and education and the remainder to his career. The book is close to 500 pages long, and I have read the first half. I found the book so interesting that I am writing about the first 250 pages today. These 250 pages end with the start of the First World War, when Wile was in Berlin as a correspondent for American and English newspapers.

La Porte is in northern Indiana. In 1873, it had about 6000 residents (today about 45,000). Wile’s father, and some of his Wile relatives wound up in La Porte, where his father became a small town banker and someone active in local political affairs. Wile was the youngest in his family – his oldest brother was about 15 years his senior. His father had been born in a small town in Germany and, like many other Germans, came to the United States in 1848.

Surprising to me his father (and his mother, whose last name had been Guggenheim) was Jewish, and was active in the local synagogue, where he was the “reader”, presumably because he had had a Jewish education of some sort in Germany. In 1939, when the book was written, the synagogue was already struggling. There is no longer a synagogue in La Porte (the closest is in Michigan City IN, only about 12 miles away), but there is a cemetery in which Wile (as well as his wife and parents) are buried. And, by the way, the history of the Wile house in La Porte, built in 1861, is written up on the website of Preserve Historic La Porte. The website also tells you that the Guggenheim house was right next door.

In spite of being Jewish, Wile was sent to Notre Dame for college. South Bend is only about 40 miles from La Porte, so that’s not surprising. What is surprising is that, according to what I gleaned from the book, anti-Catholic feeling in northern Indiana was much stronger than anti-Jewish feeling and that Notre Dame (founded exactly 100 years to the day before the day I was born) was having difficulty buying property to expand its small campus. Fritz Wile’s father to the rescue – he bought the property in his name and later transferred to the school, thus thwarting the opponents of Catholics in Indiana.

It was also surprising that Wile was not the only Jewish student at Notre Dame in the 1890s. He says there were six in a small class, and that (although they were required to attend chapel), there was no proselytizing and no antisemitism visible amongst the faculty or student body. Throughout his life, Wile remained loyal to Notre Dame and close to his classmates and teachers. He praised Catholic liberalism generally.

Enough of that. Based on his life story, Wile must have been a charmer. He always wanted to be a journalist, and although his first job in Chicago (the magnet for all those growing up in La Porte), he soon talked himself into a stringer position with a local newspaper. The deal was basically for him to cover a small local story, turn in copy, and if the story was used, he could become a regular stringer. Not much, right? But it was something. He excitedly covered the story, wrote it up, sent it in and, without one word being changed, it was printed on the first page of the newspaper. He never looked back.

After several years in Chicago as a cub reporter, he was called into his editor’s office one day. Feeling he did something dreadful, he was shocked when his editor said that he wanted to assign him to London, where the paper’s correspondent had said that the work was too much for one man. It was the middle of the Boer War and a lot of news was coming out of England. Within a few days, Wile – who had not been east of South Bend in his life – was on his way to New York, then on a boat, and then in England. He was in his mid-twenties.

One of the things that amazes me about Wile is his ability to talk to anyone and get them to speak back to him. He also (and this is clear from the book itself) was an extraordinary writer, and had an amazing memory, as he soon learned to interview without a notebook. And he had another talent – he was always in a place where something was going on, and where he encountered people on a regular basis that others only read about.

Take the ship carrying him to England. Who else was on this regular commercial liner? Well, for one, John Philip Sousa, traveling not alone but with his entire band on the way to their first European tour. And then there was Henry Adams, and the president of U.S. Steel, Charles Schwab (no, not the Charles Schwab who advertises on TV today), and others, all of whom he met. And when Wile met someone, he remembered them later and, more surprising, they remembered him.

He stayed in England several years and then was transferred to Berlin, where he stayed for 14 years, until the war broke out. The book talks about his time in both countries – his personal activities, his professional work, and what generally was going on in that part of the world.

He interviewed everyone. Take, for example, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens, of course), whom he met in 1900 in London, and to whom he devotes seven pages in his book. Twain, the 65, spent the summer of 1900 being idolized in Britain, and was staying at the elegant Brown Hotel in London. Wile arranged to interview him, showed up at the hotel, but was given a note by the concierge that said “Will Mr. Wile please come to 26 Eaton Square? SLC”.

Taking a hansom cab (this was 1900 after all) to that address, he was surprised to find that it was a “Swedish massage” establishment and that (and I quote) “a liveried doorman said that Mr Clemens was waiting for me, and would I mind walking right up to the second floor, where he was receiving his daily treatment? There, in a morgue-like room lay the great humorist, prone, on a marble-slabbed table and naked as the day he was born, the while a muscular Norseman pawed him vigorously and rhythmically from head to foot, as Mark obliviously pulled and puffed on a strong cigar. We shook hands, and he smilingly apologized for so unconventional a reception of a reporter.” The interview (including a walk through Hyde Park) went on from there. Clemens told him that the book of his he thought was the best was Huckleberry Finn.

Another interview which I enjoyed reading about was his brief meeting with J.P. Morgan, who was apparently someone who never agreed to be interviewed, who was genial and smiling, told him nothing whatsoever, walked him to the door, still smiling, asking Wile to give him a call the next time he was in New York to speak with him again. And his interview with the Swedish king, a man who also never had one on one interviews with foreign reporters. That interview started with King Haakon saying: “What shall we speak today – English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese or Spanish? You see, I know them all…….”. And there were so many more.

But the culmination of the first half of the book was the beginning of World War I on July 25, 1914. The heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been murdered in Sarajevo by two Serbians. Austria gave an ultimatum to Serbia (apparently written in conjunction with Prussia, which had been building up its military for a number of years), containing a number of demands. There was concern that if Austria invaded Serbia, the Russians would jump to Serbia’s defense, and that the Prussians would then feel obligated to defend Austria, and the French would jump in to help their Russian ally. Whether England would enter such a war was unclear. But we all know what happened.

Apparently (and I did not know this), Serbia agreed to all but one of the Austrian demands, and that was satisfactory enough to Emperor Franz Josef to call off any plans of invasion. But now, once again, fake news takes the foreground. Perhaps because the Prussian War Party (as Wile calls it) was just looking for an excuse to show its muscle and win a quick victory, the Austrian position was not reported to the people of Berlin. Berlin was told that Serbia had rejected Austria’s demand and that war was imminent.

I quote again: “My long standing preconceptions of Berlin as the phlegmatic capital of a stolid people were obliterated for all time at eight thirty o’clock on Saturday evening, July 25, 1914. Along with them went equally cherished beliefs that, however incorrigible the War Party’s lust for international strife, the German masses were pacific by temperament and predilection. As soon as the news of Serbia’s alleged rejection of Austria’s ultimatum was made known, Berlin gave way to a babel and pandemonium of war frenzy probably never equaled in a civilized community.” And, again the rest is history.

I will leave it here for now, only to say that my chance encounter with this unknown book by a today unknown journalist was an extraordinary find. I am confident that the second 250 pages will be just as informative and enticing.