September 17 Saturday – Sam wrote from San Francisco to William Wright (Dan De Quille) about Sam selling his furniture and about debts. Sam was tired of night work on the Call:

“I don’t work after 6 in the evening, now on the ‘Call.’ I got disgusted with night work.”

Sam’s new deal with George Barnes, owner of the Call, was for shorter hours and less pay [MTL 1: 309]. In his Autobiography Sam related the changes and finding a new assistant to help him with the work:

…there was way too much of it for one man. The way I was conducting it now, there was enough of it for two or three. Even Barnes noticed that, and told me to get an assistant, on half wages. There was a great hulking creature down in the counting-room—good natured, obliging, unintellectual—and he was getting little or nothing a week and boarding himself. A graceless boy of the counting-room force who had no reverence for anybody or anything, was always making fun of this beachcomber, and he had a name for him which somehow intensely apt and descriptive—I don’t know why. He called him Smiggy McGlural. I offered the berth of assistant to Smiggy, and he accepted it with alacrity and gratitude. He went at his work with ten times the energy that was left in me. He was not intellectual, but mentality was not required or needed in a Morning Call reporter, and so he conducted his office to perfection. I gradually got to leaving more and more of the work to McGlural. I grew lazier and lazier, and within thirty days he was doing almost the whole of it. It was also plain that he could accomplish the whole of it, and more, all by himself, and therefore had no real need of me [AMT 2: 116-17]. Note: Smiggy was William K. McGrew (1827-1903); his nickname came from the title of a humorous popular song in the 1860s. See more about McGrew in AMT 2: 516.

The following two local articles in the Call are attributed to Sam: “Blunder Corrected,” and “Dr. Raymond Not Removed” [Branch, C of Call 298-9].