[Internal Clarion editorial note, on half-sheet notepaper, in Harriss's hand. Clipped to the front of McCausland's manuscript, filed April 1927.]
Thomas —
I have read it three times.
It is the best piece this newspaper has published in twenty years, which is not a small thing to say about a newspaper that has been publishing for forty-one.
Print notes:
The Iphigenia story stands as filed. Two sources named, two on background, the log in evidence, the deposition on file. Legal has read it. Legal says print it.
The Thorpe story: Pytel's account, the Pemberton's ledger, the Ostermann file. Linden has not responded to your letter from Niagara Falls, which I am treating as a response. We note his silence and we print around it. This is sufficient. I have done it before.
One thing I want you to know, and then I am done talking about this until after it prints.
In February of 1913 I was associate editor of this newspaper. Vantine came to me with the Dannemeyer piece and asked what I thought. I said I thought it was true. He said that is not what I am asking you. I understood what he was asking and I said: it is your newspaper. And he killed it.
I have thought about that conversation every year since. I told myself Dannemeyer was young and excitable and the inquest had returned its verdict and perhaps the boilers really had failed and perhaps a first-year reporter did not know what he was seeing. I told myself these things long after I stopped believing them.
You are not a first-year reporter. You know what you are seeing. And this is my newspaper now.
Run it Friday.
C.H.
April 1927
[Below, in McCausland's hand:]
She initialled every page of the manuscript herself. She has not done that since I have worked here. I think she has been waiting to initial those pages since 1913.
I called my mother before I filed. I told her the story was going to print. She said: good. She said: your father would have said the same. I said I know. She said: he would have said it quieter.