Making up headlines wasn’t just a joke from the movie Newsies. No need for the catch words “love nest,” “corpse” or “nude” here: our friend Philip Marcus used stories from a particular city to push papers on a slow day.

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When I was sellin’ papers, if there wasn’t anything startling we could yell about to help sell the papers, we always got around it this way: we’d look all over the sheet lookin’ for a story from Washington, anything at all, no matter what it was, an’ then we’d yell like hell, we’d yell:

“Read all about the White House Scandal! All about the White House Scandal! The White House Scandal! Read all about it!”