Dryden left Monmouth plow factory to become ‘Dean of Sports Writers’
MONMOUTH, Ill. — If you’ve ever called someone a “bonehead,” you can thank a Monmouth man for coining that word, along with many of the colorful phrases that have made their way into the lexicon of sports writing.
Charles Dryden, born on a farm near Monmouth in 1860, has been acknowledged by many baseball historians as “the dean of sports writers.” Dryden used bonehead to describe an infamous 1908 incident in which New York Giants first baseman Fred Merkle failed to touch second base in a playoff game against the Chicago Cubs that caused the Giants to lose the championship and touched off a riot.
Nicknames were Dryden’s specialty. He dubbed Charles A. Comiskey “The Old Roman,” Frank Chance “The Peerless Leader,” Johnny Evers “The Keystone King” and Ed Walsh “Big Moose.” He once described that swaggering White Sox pitcher as “the only man who could strut while standing still.”
By the time Dryden was hired by the Chicago Tribune in 1905, his salary was reported to be the highest ever paid to a baseball writer.
Dryden’s rise to the pinnacle of his profession was improbable, unexpected and circuitous, to say the least. Had it not been for a few colleagues who recognized his gift for humorous writing, he likely would have spent his entire career pouring molten iron into sand molds at Monmouth’s Pattee Plow Company.
We know about Dryden’s early days through a series of humorous autobiographical accounts that were serialized in newspapers shortly after the turn of the century. In 1905 they were published in an anthology titled “On and Off the Bread Wagon: Being the Hard Luck Tales, Doings and Adventures of an Amateur Hobo.” Although Monmouth is renamed “Mudville” in the book, it is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with the early days of the Maple City.
Dryden tells of being stuffed into a bobsled at the age of 5 with his large family and furniture, moving in the winter from the family farm near Norwood at the north Warren County line to their new home in Monmouth, where his father had taken a job as an insurance salesman.
As Dryden recounts the miseries of attending school, we learn that two of his classmates also achieved world recognition — Loie Fuller, the famed Parisian serpentine dancer, and Warren Bunkerr, a cross-dressing “skirt dancer,” who took the stages of Europe by storm.
Dryden’s desire to shake off the provincial poverty of Mudville is evident in several of his accounts. When coal and clay were discovered near Monmouth, he and his friends decided to strike it rich by forming their own mining company. When his father discovered the hole they had dug in his garden, they were forced to fill it in, and then dug an even deeper shaft in the barnyard of his friends, owned by their widowed mother. One night the widow’s only cow was killed when it fell into the hole. They secretly buried the evidence, then under the ruse of searching for the cow in the woods, escaped school and enjoyed fishing instead.
Dryden’s lack of interest in school concerned his father, who had taken a job as a traveling salesman for the Pattee Plow Co., and decided it would be a good place to put young Charles to work. At the age of 14, Charles became an apprentice to an iron moulder, working 10 hours per day at a salary of $3 per week. After three years of this drudgery, he decided to hit the road and traveled to Omaha in search of a foundry job.
After knocking around the country for a couple of years, Dryden landed a job as a union moulder in Chicago, earning $12 per week, but his father thought it was beneath him and arranged a job at a Monmouth ice cream parlor at $3 per week. Dryden had different ideas, and after three weeks making sodas, he hopped a train west and resumed a hobo lifestyle.
At age 22, Dryden enlisted in the Navy for a three-year tour, but less than a year later suffered an eye injury during drill, which may have been precipitated by an earlier injury in the foundry. It would plague him for the rest of his life. He was hospitalized and in 1884 was discharged before his tour had ended.
Dryden wrote his first baseball story in 1889, after witnessing his very first major league game in Chicago. Written in the archaic style of the Bible, it was an instant hit, and soon several papers were vying for his services. He spent the next seven years on the West Coast, writing for papers in San Francisco and Tacoma. In 1896, when William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Journal, he hired Dryden to be its baseball writer. It was during this time that Dryden had a famous feud with New York Giants owner Andrew Freedman, who banned him from the Polo Grounds. That didn’t stop Dryden, though, who continued to cover games with the assistance of friends, and reportedly watched one game from the top of a telephone pole, and another dressed as an old lady.
Lured to Philadelphia in 1903 to write for the North American, Dryden began his longest stint two years later in Chicago, first covering the White Sox, then for many years traveling with the Cubs and reporting on all their games.
In 1921, while in Chicago for an eye appointment, Dryden suffered a debilitating stroke. Unable to speak for the rest of his life, the lifelong bachelor was cared for by his sister, Louise Davenport, first in Florida and then at a cottage in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. He died in a Biloxi hospital in 1931 and his funeral was held in Monmouth. His headstone in Monmouth Cemetery carries the inscription “The Dean of Sports Writers.”
Dryden was inducted into the writers’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1965.
Jeff Rankin is an editor and historian for Monmouth College. He has been researching, writing and speaking about western Illinois history for more than 40 years.
