FOR some reason, never made sufficiently clear, Rivers' parents
had handicapped him from the baptismal font with the prenomen of
Conde, which, however, upon Anglo-Saxon tongues, had been promptly
modified to Condy, or even, among his familiar and intimate
friends, to Conny. Asked as to his birthplace--for no Californian
assumes that his neighbor is born in the State--Condy was wont to
reply that he was "bawn 'n' rais'" in Chicago; "but," he always
added, "I couldn't help that, you know." His people had come West
in the early eighties, just in time to bury the father in alien
soil. Condy was an only child. He was educated at the State
University, had a finishing year at Yale, and a few months after
his return home was taken on the staff of the San Francisco "Daily
Times" as an associate editor of its Sunday supplement. For Condy
had developed a taste and talent in the matter of writing. Short
stories were his mania. He had begun by an inoculation of the
Kipling virus, had suffered an almost fatal attack of Harding
Davis, and had even been affected by Maupassant. He "went in" for
accuracy of detail; held that if one wrote a story involving
firemen one should have, or seem to have, every detail of the
department at his fingers' ends, and should "bring in" to the tale
all manner of technical names and cant phrases.

Much of his work on the Sunday supplement of "The Times" was of
the hack order--special articles, write-ups, and interviews.
About once a month, however, he wrote a short story, and of late,
now that he was convalescing from Maupassant and had begun to be
somewhat himself, these stories had improved in quality, and one
or two had even been copied in the Eastern journals. He earned
$100 a month.