O.O. McIntyre
Passaic Daily News/December 16, 1914
New York, Dec. 16.—Arthur Barney met Bide Dudley on Broadway the other day and beamingly drew him aside. “I’ve got a new one,” he said.
Thinking he meant his hair restorer was beginning to work, Dudley said, “Fine! You’ll soon have enough to comb.”
“Not hair!” Barney almost shouted. “A new dance step! It’s the alligator dip.”
“How’s it done?”
“Well, first you step to the right; then glide to the rear, doing a sort of a right angle triangle and waving the elbow. After that come ahead and bend the knees. Next come up and then do it all over again.”
Just then Lew Dockstadter came along. He was asked if he knew how to dance the alligator dip.
“Well,” he said after a moments reflection, “I should say every couple that dances it is an alligator pair.” At this point Big Babe McDonald the traffic cop ordered the trio to move on.
***
Commodore Robert E. Peary, six feet and over tall, square shouldered, bronzed, was walking without an overcoat with a youthful, springing step on Broadway the other day at noon. It was at the time when the sidewalks and streets were filled with the lower New York noon-day crowd.
A newspaper man saw him stop and stare at the new Woolworth Building soaring to the sky. He stopped so suddenly that four people bumped into him. One gave vent to an oath for his seeming carelessness and the others passed on without an “excuse me.”
Not a person in the crowd seemed to recognize the man who claims to have discovered the north pole. A few days later Dr. Cook, another claimant, nearly blocked Forty-Second Street by the crowds following him.
Such is fame!
***
War is wrong and war is stupid according to Bishop Greer—‘tis Franklin P. Adams philosophizing—but when a lot of Zeppelins are zepping above your city, you can’t shout up to them and say: “Hey there. Go away. War is wrong and stupid.”
Bishop Greer says that there is a moral force in the world which is stronger than many people suppose and that if we trust it, we shall find it a very effective force. It wasn’t strong enough to keep Henry Siegel from filching thousands from his helpless employes and it wasn’t strong enough to give him what he might have got if he had been a Terrible Menace like Bouck White the preacher, who asked a simple question in the Rockefeller Church and went to jail for six months.
Nor is the moral force in the world strong enough to keep girls’ wages above $6.50 a week, nor to prevent men from exploiting the labor of children. Briefly, as Colonel Adams sees it, the cosmic moral force isn’t batting over .017. And it isn’t a slump year either.
***
David Lamar, the Wolf of Wall Street, just sentenced to prison, might have stepped from the pages of E. Phillips Oppenheim’s novel—any one of them. The magazine writers are frequently astounding the readers with the she-devils, he-saints, boa constrictors of Wall Street, vipers of the department store, and occasionally the picture runs true to type.
Lamar was a daring hanger-on of the mighty, a master of impudence, never risking money where check would do. He served not only himself but greater and wiser men. There are hundreds of Lamars on Broadway and in Wall Street sleek, prosperous and sly. They wait for victims in the Lobster Palaces, the grills and the big hotel lobbies.
The trick for which Lamar was sentenced, the impersonation Congressman over the phone, is typical of the breed.
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