Walt Mason

Walt Mason (May 4, 1862 – June 22, 1939) was a Canadian-born American journalist and writer, whose daily column was syndicated by George Matthew Adams in over 200 US and Canadian newspapers during the early part of the 20th Century.

He was called "the poet laureate of common sense", and the "Homer of modern America", but referred to himself as "the Fat One". His columns were collected into eight books of "prose poems" between 1910 and 1919, for which admirers such as Theodore Dreiser, James Whitcomb Riley, William Dean Howells, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Ade, and Mary Roberts Rinehart wrote laudatory testimonials.

Early years

He was born in Columbus, Canada West, the sixth of seven sons for John Mason, an English-born Welsh wool-sorter and Lydia Sarah Campbell, a Quebec-born housewife of Scottish background. The family were members of the United Presbyterian Church. He was four when his father died in an accident at the factory where he and his brothers would later be employed. Like his older brothers, Mason became an apprentice weaver around twelve years of age. He suffered lifelong partial deafness from a swimming incident at age thirteen. His mother died when he was fifteen, after which he went to Port Hope, Ontario and worked in a hardware store.

Arrival in America

Mason moved to upstate New York about the time he turned 18 in 1880. He worked on farms then drifted to the Midwest, landing in St. Louis, Missouri. There he got a job running a printing press for a short-lived humor magazine called The St. Louis Hornet. He also contributed writings to it, and became well known enough in the local area for an Illinois newspaper to quote him in 1881. When the magazine folded Mason moved on to Frankfort, Kansas where he rode the range as a cowhand.