When I heard that the character of Katherine Plumber was Pulitzer's daughter in the Newsies musical, I smelled something fishy and trotted on down to the library (naw son, just googled it) and looked up the family of the actual Joseph Pulitzer. The man did indeed have three daughters (one of whom had died by July 1899), but none were named Katherine, and none were spunky girl reporters. I was stirred by these findings to pound out this little trifle exploring the REAL daughters of J. Pulitzer; while some (rather more than some) artistic liberties have been taken in ascribing to them personalities, I have used the meager sources available to me to patch together a shoddy little story describing their ABSOLUTELY FICTITIOUS exploits, all based somewhat in history. If you wanna check my sources, shoot me a message and GOOD SIR, I will supply you with sources.
(This is not to say that I myself disapprove of the Newsies musical, or really of Katherine Plumber- I just object to her being JP's daughter. I mean, really, Mr. Fierstein? Jack's new love interest is the historically-inaccurate daughter of his greatest enemy, in disguise? What is this, some bad fanfiction written by a thirteen-year-old girl? But I digress.)
Well THIS is a fanfiction (I shan't remark on its quality), so WHATEVA WHATEVA I DO WHAT I WANT.
I don't own the Newsies, nor their movie, nor their musical; I don't own the Pulitzers, although these incarnations of the Pulitzer children are indeed mine. Now it's showtime, R&R and all that poppycock what what.
August 11, 1899
Now I first saw Jack Kelly in the morning paper, around a month ago. It was July. The headline came with coffee and toast on my breakfast tray, and I remember almost spilling the scalding drink over my lacy white sheets as I leaned in closer to get a good look at the photo of a group of newsies, hamming it up for a portrait by some unknown photographer.
Newsies Stop The World.
His face peered out at me between columns on the Hague Convention and the Dreyfus Affair. They all looked so innocent, so happy; I could hardly believe that they were the cause of father's headache of the week.
The older ones looked rather dashing.
Granted, I wouldn't have seen it at all, but I had recently adopted father's habit of scanning daily every newspaper printed in the city. The New York World, of course, was the ultimate authority on everything, the veritable word of God. It gave me a little glow of pride whenever I read one of father's letters from the publisher, or recognized in an article some point that we had discussed over dinner. Father owned The World.
The World had stopped.
But not for good. All that ended a week ago, when the distribution price of papers was returned to its original two-fer-a-penny, and father had come home angry. Still, it was not but a minor skirmish lost in the circulation wars against Hearst's New York Journal, and father was still confident that we would emerge victorious in the end.
All of this mattered little to me. I was Edith Pulitzer, seventeen, healthy, wealthy, and bored.
"Bert!"
My youngest brother hardly registered that he had heard my hiss, and leaned even further out of the carriage window.
"Herbert Pulitzer! Get back inside now!" when Bert failed to comply, I hauled him back from the window by his suspenders.
"What d'ya have to do that for?" he whined, crossing his arms petulantly and scowling.
"You cannot simply drive down Broadway leaning out of the Pulitzer carriage like some kind of roughneck," I sniffed. "It's uncivilized."
"What were you looking at?" asked Constance, suspiciously. She was fifteen, that age where she was perfectly torn between berating twelve-year-old Bert and using the opportunity of my distraction to lean out the other side and take a gander.
"Just the newsies," grumped Herbert.
"Newsies!" the latter side clearly won out, and Constance bounced to the window to look.
"We passed 'em."
"Them," I annunciated. "THem."
Herbert was silent.
"Say it, Bert."
"Thhhhhhhhhem," he lisped, before slouching back on the cushions.
"I wonder if you saw Jack Kelly," sighed Constance reverentially, sliding off of her elbows and resting a cheek on the sill.
"Strike leader Jack Kelly!" joined in Herbert, punching the air in immaterial protest. He, the littlest son of the biggest newspaperman in New York, had developed the mannerism of parroting headlines ad nauseum.
Come to think of it, he's make a good newsie himself.
The carriage rolled to a stop, and I took a deep breath. "We're here," I sighed, stating the obvious. The carriage door swung open, and the sounds and smells of New York Harbor rushed inside.
The ride back was subdued. Nobody leant out the windows, and not a single Kelly was mentioned from the docks to Midtown.
We had just bid bon voyage to the rest of the family- mother, father, our brothers Ralph and Joe, and the Wickhams, the family of Joe's fiancée, Eleanor. Handkerchiefs awaft in the sticky air, we had waved them southeast in search of bracing sea air and respite from the smoke and noise of New York on the family yacht, the Liberty. The yearly farewells at our private mooring always served as a reminder that summer was coming to a close and soon I would be speeding North in my own Pullman car, ready to complete my final year at a young ladies' conservatory Upstate.
I was mired in these musings when we drew to a halt in front of the imposing 73rd street mansion that the Pulitzers called home. I snapped back to reality, catching the tail end of Constance and Herbert's conversation. They were speaking of newsies.
"Don't you two ever tire of those crass newsboys?" I sighed, irritable in the August heat.
"Never!" proclaimed Bert, throwing open the carriage door before the coachman could hold it open for us.
Crunch!
Carriage doors were not supposed to go crunch, nor were they supposed to jar the entire carriage on impact or let out a spine-tickling moan of pain.
We piled out of the coach as if chased by a bat out of hell and peered around the door.
We had hit a person.
We had hit a newsie.
The boy couldn't have been more than twelve, Bert's age, with a dark complexion and a babyface.
"I'll be fine, really," the boy was telling the coachman, dazed. His eyes seemed to have trouble focusing. The boy reached a hand back to adjust his newsboy cap. When he looked down at his palms after, they were dripping red.
The newsie let out a faint shriek and toppled back over onto the cobblestones of 73rd, out like a light and suddenly the responsibility of one Edith Pulitzer.