Walt Mason (May 4, 1862 – June 22, 1939)[1] 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.

[4] 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.

[5] He was born in Columbus, Canada West, the sixth of seven sons[fn 1] for John Mason, an English-born Welsh wool-sorter and Lydia Sarah Campbell, a Quebec-born housewife of Scottish background.

[19] Later legend had it that Mason had submitted a poem to Col. Dan Anthony, editor of The Leavenworth Times, received $5 for it, and immediately went to work for the paper as a reporter at $8 a week.

[8] During February 1885, the newspaper started running a serialized straight prose work by Mason called Rough Times, a humorous account of life in a boarding house.

[22] Mason "severed connections" with The Leavenworth Times in late May 1885,[23] and by early June was employed by Edward Howe at The Atchison Globe.

After one year he left the Globe under murky circumstances[fn 4] for the St. Louis Whip, an illustrated weekly where he was an assistant editor, writing advertising jingles.

[25] This was an early instance of what Walt Mason later wrote was a cyclical occurrence in his life: "I would equip myself with a good suit of clothes, and purple and fine linen, and become obtrusively respectable, and then of a sudden would come a great longing for the gilded saloon and the company of people who drank not wisely but too well.

away would fly all the excellent resolutions, and I'd wake up some fine morning in a livery stable to find my raiment was in the pawnshop and that I couldn't remember whether it was Wednesday or the Chinese New Year.

[27] By this time Mason was working on the Evening News in Washington, D.C.[28] Returning to his small dairy farm in Beatrice, Nebraska, he tried running his own Saturday Summary newspaper during 1905–1906, but ran afoul of the postal authorities, who concluded it was little more than an advertising sheet and forbade its use of the mail for delivery.

[29][30] By January 1907 he was back "doing a special stint" writing editorials for the Beatrice Daily Express under the column name Side Issues.

[42] The Topeka State Journal observed in December that Mason, who was telegraph editor, had been "writing doggeral rhymes as heads for the big news stories".

[43] A later anecdote held that his prose poems first appeared in the Gazette when the city editor was shy a daily local-interest piece called the "star head",[fn 6] and asked Mason to fill in with something.

[47] For Memorial Day of 1908 Mason wrote a prose poem called Little Green Tents that appeared in the "star head" of the Gazette,[48] that is often cited as one of his best.

[1] A work of gentle melancholy, it portrayed the graves of American Civil War soldiers and the surviving veterans as both worthy of remembrance.

[50] The Adams Newspaper Service had already signed Mason's boss, William Allen White, to write a political column for syndication in 1908.

[54] Mason had a young colleague on the Emporia Gazette named Brock Pemberton, who wrote a profile of the man who was "Uncle Walt".

An event of the day demands a prose poem, and a few minutes work at the machine... produces it, without need of revision and such accurate and clean copy as to delight the editor's eye.

[4] Pemberton also revealed the extent of mail pouring into the Gazette office from admirers of "Uncle Walt", from all parts of North America and overseas.

[56] The steady income allowed Mason to build a custom-designed home on one of the first paved streets in Emporia, a house which he referred to as his "igloo",[4] and later came to be on the National Register of Historic Places.

By now Mason could afford to take his family to Estes Park, Colorado for summer vacations in his new touring car, though in deference to his age and partial deafness he hired a local lad to do the driving.