Bad luck there.
That release date sat back in late January — and here Colin was, sitting in mid-November, months past anything close to newsworthy.
No angle left to squeeze out of it.
He knew what came next, too.
Six years down the line, Chaplin would put out one more silent picture — his last one — Modern Times.
And Einstein really had cried at that premiere.
Except “six years down the line” meant 1936.
Might as well have been a different century.
None of it did a damn thing for a newspaper bleeding out right now, in this room, in this month.
Colin’s eyes swept past the film piece and kept moving.
“…Truth is, nobody’s starving.
These vagrants eat better than they used to…
one man in New York put away ten meals in a single day.”
The headline above it stopped him cold.
Massive type, impossible to miss.
Who says something like that, in a time like this?
Then he caught the byline.
Hoover.
Ah.
Right.
Never mind.
Say what you wanted about Hoover — the man had drawn the single worst hand any President in American history had ever been dealt.
Walked into office right as the floor gave out from under the whole country, and every ounce of public rage over the Depression landed squarely on his shoulders.
His name would end up meaning “poverty” for generations after this.
The tin-and-cardboard shantytowns crowding city outskirts got a name of their own — Hoovervilles.
The burlap sacks unemployed men carried around scavenging for scraps became Hoover bags.
Somewhere out in farm country, men were literally sawing the fronts off dead cars and hitching them to half-starved mules, calling the wreckage a Hoover wagon.
Old newsprint wrapped around a park bench sleeper for warmth — a Hoover blanket.
History would remember his term as a disaster, plain and simple.
But living through it, sitting right in the thick of it the way Colin was now, he found he understood the bitterness a lot better than any textbook had ever managed to explain it to him.
Especially reading Hoover’s actual answers to reporters, printed right there in black and white.
Colin’s frown deepened with every line.
That distance from the people actually suffering, stacked on top of policy that never seemed to land — that combination was exactly what would cost Hoover the next election. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
No mystery to it at all.
“Hold on.
Maybe I can…”
Colin sat staring at the Hoover piece, something shifting behind his eyes as the idea took shape.
“Little John.”
He set the paper down, called the name out flat, decisive.
“Coming!”
Little John’s hand shot out for his camera on reflex before his feet even moved, and he crossed the room in a handful of quick strides, coming to a stop in front of the desk.
He swallowed, nerves plain on his face.
“What do you need, Boss?”
Clack, clack—
Old John’s fingers kept moving across the typesetting keys, steady out of habit alone, but his eyes kept sliding toward the desk despite himself.
“I need you to run something for me…”
Colin dug into his pocket, came up with a handful of worn coins, slid them across the desk, and leaned in close, voice dropping low as he laid out the instructions.
Little John’s head snapped up, surprise breaking across his face for a beat — then he ducked his head back down fast, scooped the coins off the desk, and mumbled his answer.
“Understood, Boss.
Going now.”
Old John watched his son’s back disappear out the door, confusion flickering behind the brass lenses.
Before he could get a question out, Colin’s voice cut across the room first.
“Old John.
You know how to reach the newsboys?”
“Newsboys?”
Old John blinked, hands stilling on the keys.
“Papers don’t usually chase after newsboys, Boss.
They come to us.
Publication day, they show up, they buy.”
That was how it worked, this era.
Newsboys weren’t staff.
They bought bundles wholesale off the delivery men or straight from the office — seventy cents a stack — then hawked them individually on the corners at two cents a paper, scraping out whatever thin margin was left between the two numbers to call it a living.
Which explained exactly why every last one of them watched The Messenger’s sales like their own dinner depended on it.
Because it did.
Every unsold paper meant a loss straight out of a newsboy’s pocket.
“Is there a faster way to get these newsboys in front of me?
Today, if possible.”
Waiting for the weekly publication day wasn’t happening.
Not with the state the paper was in.
Colin didn’t think The Messenger had that kind of runway left.
“Well…
give me a second.”
Old John hesitated, thinking it over.
“There’s a deliveryman I know.
He might know how to track them down.”
Colin nodded, satisfied.
Right then the door swung open.
Little John, back already.
That fast?
Old John’s eyebrows shot up.
Eleven, maybe twelve minutes since his son had walked out that door — barely enough time to get anywhere and back.
“Get the shot?”
Colin didn’t look surprised in the least.
Just asked, calm, like he’d expected exactly this.
“Got it.”
Little John nodded, lifted the camera in confirmation, voice low.
“Did just what you said, Boss.
Took the photo first, then handed the cake over to the family.”
The cake in question wasn’t anything close to what later generations would picture at the word.
Three-No cake — a Depression-era invention, born entirely out of necessity.
No milk, no eggs, no butter, the three staples any real cake needed.
So people improvised: water standing in for milk, baking powder standing in for eggs, vegetable oil standing in for butter.
Mix all three substitutes with flour, a pinch of sugar, whatever spice happened to be on hand, and bake.
Nobody expected it to taste good.
It didn’t.
Its whole job was filling a stomach, nothing more.
And for people scraping by in the middle of a collapse like this one, filling the stomach was the entire point.
Taste didn’t even enter the conversation.