On more than one occasion when searching for an inspirational muse to share with you, I have turned to Edgar Guest. His Horatio Alger-like life story is inspiring in itself.
Edgar Albert Guest (1881 – 1959) was a prolific English-born American poet who was popular in the first half of the 20th century and became known as the People’s Poet. “Eddie” Guest was born in Birmingham, England in 1881, moving to Michigan USA as a young child, it was here he was educated.
In 1895, the year before Henry Ford took his first ride in a motor carriage, Eddie Guest signed on with the Free Press as a 13-year-old office boy. He stayed for 60 years. In those six decades, Detroit underwent half a dozen identity changes, but Eddie Guest became a steadfast character on the changing scene. Three years after he joined the Free Press, Guest became a cub reporter. He quickly worked his way through the labor beat — a much less consequential beat than it is today — the waterfront beat and the police beat, where he worked “the dog watch” — 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. By the end of that year — the year he should have been completing high school — Guest had a reputation as a scrappy reporter in a competitive town.
It did not occur to Guest to write in verse until late in 1898 when he was working as assistant exchange editor. It was his job to cull timeless items from the newspapers with which the Free Press exchanged papers for use as fillers. Many of the items were verses. Guest figured he might just as well write verse as clip it and submitted one of his own, a dialect verse, to Sunday editor Arthur Mosley. The Free Press was choosy about publishing the literary efforts of staff members and Guest, a 17-year-old dropout, might have been seen as something of an upstart. But Mosley decided to publish the verse, and Guest’s first verse ran on Dec. 11, 1898. More contributions of verse and observations led to a weekly column, Blue Monday Chat, and then a daily column, Breakfast Table Chat.”
Verse had always been part of Guest’s writing, but he had more or less followed the workaday road of many newsmen for 10 years. In 1908, standing in the rain as the solitary mourner for one such journalist who had long since been forgotten and relegated to the newspaper’s morgue, Guest resolved to escape that fate by becoming a specialist. From that day forward, nearly all of his writing was in meter and rhyme.
And readers loved it.
They asked where they could find collections of his folksy verses. Guest talked it over his younger brother Harry, a typesetter, and they bought a case of type. They were in the book publishing business.
After supper, Harry would climb the stairs to the attic of their home to set Eddie’s poetry. Harry could set as many as eight pages — provided the verses didn’t have too many “e’s” in them — before he had to print what he had and break up the forms for eight more pages. They printed 800 copies of a 136-page book, Home Rhymes. Two years later, in 1911 and still working in eight-page morsels, they printed Just Glad Things, but upped the press order to 1,500 copies. They escaped the limits of their type case with the third book, published in 1914, but Guest had some misgivings about the large press run — 3,500 copies. It sold out in two Christmases.
More books followed, and before he was done Guest had filled more than 20. Sales ran into the millions and his most popular collection, It Takes a Heap o’ Livin’, sold more than a million copies by itself.
Guest’s verses, originally clipped by exchange editors at other papers, went into syndication and he was ultimately carried by more than 300 newspapers. His popularity led to one of early radios longest-running radio shows, appearances on television, in Hollywood, and in banquet halls and meeting rooms from coast to coast. But Edgar A. Guest remained, at heart and in fact, a newspaper man. In 1939, he told Editor & Publisher,
“I’ve never been late with my copy and I’ve never missed an edition. And that’s seven days a week.” For more than 30 years, there was not a day that the Free Press went to press without Guest’s verse on its pages. He worked for the Free Press for more than six decades. Thousands of Detroiters were born, grew up and had children of their own before a Free Press ever arrived at their homes without Guest’s gentle human touch.
When Guest died in 1959, he was buried in Detroit’s Woodlawn Cemetery.
I’m sure most of you are familiar with the adage that it’s not the date of your birth or the date of your death that defines whether you have lived a fulfilling life. That can only be determined by what’s in the dash between those two dates. Edgar had an exceptional dash. What follows is one of Guest’s poems that, in the hindsight of his life, could be truly labeled as autobiographic. It is titled The Finer Thought. For the millions of people who have been nourished by his prolific prose, Guest’s shared words truly reflect our collective finer thoughts…and his.
How fine it is at night to say:
I have not wronged a soul today.
I have not by a word or deed,
In any breast sowed anger’s seed,
Or caused a fellow being pain;
Nor is there on my crest a stain
That shame has left. In honor’s way,
With head erect, I’ve lived this day.
When night slips down and day departs
And rest returns to weary hearts,
How fine it is to close the book
Of records for the day, and look
Once more along the traveled mile
And find that all has been worthwhile;
To say: In honor I have toiled;
My plume is spotless and unsoiled.
Yet cold and stern a man may be
Retaining his integrity;
And he may pass from day to day
A spirit dead, in living clay,
Observing strictly morals, laws,
Yet serving but a selfish cause;
So it is not enough to say:
I have not stooped to shame today!
It is a finer, nobler thought
When day is done and night has brought
The contemplative hours and sweet,
And rest to weary hearts and feet,
If man can stand in truth and say:
I have been useful here today.
Back there is one I chanced to see
With hope newborn because of me.
This day in honor I have toiled;
My shining crest is still unsoiled;
But on the mile I leave behind
Is one who says that I was kind;
And someone hums a cheerful song
Because I chanced to come along.
Sweet rest at night that man shall own
Who has not lived his day alone.
Have an awe-full weekend!
William J. “Bill” Bacque’