My paternal grandfather, James T. H. Leiby, was born in 1884. His father died when he was 13. As the oldest in a family of five, he went to work as a newsboy selling newspapers, the Allentown Morning Call. As the years went by, he learned Morse code to take news stories off the wire. Later, in the Twenties, I think, he learned to be a telegrapher and wrote the stories himself. I may have some of this wrong, but I can’t find his obituary right now. He became the front page editor and my father remembered how every Sunday morning he would compare his front page with that of the New York Times to see if he had picked the same stories for the front page as the Times did. Usually he did, and he was always disappointed when he didn’t. He died of heart failure in 1948 and the owner and editor of the paper helped carry the casket.
