James J. Montague - Early Life

Early Life

James Jackson Montague was born in Mason City, Iowa on April 16, 1873, the sixth child and third son of John Vose Wood Montague and Martha Washington Jackson. The couple lost their first daughter and son in early childhood; four children survived, including James, his brother Richard, and daughters Carrie and Jane.

In Mason City the father worked as a cashier of the First National Bank until it began to lose money in the recession of 1887. The family then moved to Portland, Oregon, where the father went into the insurance business. James J. Montague entered high school there, finishing in two years so he could go to work to help support the family. Consequently he never attended university, but he made up for his lack of formal education through a love of literature. In the memoir Memory Street, his son Richard wrote: "He was an omnivorous reader, especially of the works of Shakespeare, Conrad, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Byron Burns"

Montague first worked at lumber mill and later a fish-freezing plant. When he heard there was an opening for an office boy at the Portland Oregonian, he was sufficiently interested in becoming a journalist that he offered to initially work without pay. In 1896, at age 23, he was hired as a "cub" reporter at a salary of $10 a week. Soon after, the writer of an Oregonian column titled "Slings and Arrows" died, and Montague was offered the opportunity to take it over. His version of the column, which often included comic verse, was considered "an immediate success."

In 1898, at age 25, Montague married Helen L. Hageny of Portland, Oregon. Their first child, Richard, was born in 1900. Two years later Montague's writing attracted the attention of publisher William Randolph Hearst through New York Evening Journal cartoonist Homer Davenport, who had worked at the Oregonian before moving to New York in 1895. Through an agent, Hearst offered Montague a position in New York City but he declined, preferring to remain in Portland. Hearst was insistent, however, and the writer named what he thought was a prohibitive price, $60 a week — double his salary at the time — and was "flabbergasted" when it was accepted.