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planned. I had one of the Winter Garden chorus girls cut off her hair, dress as a boy, and go aboard the 'Carpathia,' and stay there until the ship left the pier. Then she allowed herself to be discovered. She explained to the captain that she had been so thrilled by the deeds of the 'Carpathia' officers that she wanted to show her admiration of them as heroes. So she had stowed away on board the ship, hoping to be carried as a cabin boy. Of course she was sent back on a tug; but her picture and the story of her exploit were printed in hundreds of papers.

"The next time the 'Carpathia' came, I had bought a fine black cat and provided her with an elaborate silver collar, inscribed, 'From the New York Winter Garden.' Members of the company took the cat down and presented her to the captain as a mascot for the ship. The papers printed the cat's picture and the story. And, of course, for a long time, every passenger on the 'Carpathia' heard about the cat.

"Of course, these publicity stunts sometimes fail. Mr. Shubert once engaged an East Indian dancer in Paris. It was my business to create interest in her; so I announced that she was so grieved at being exiled from her native land that she would not set foot on any foreign soil, and therefore was always carried about in a sedan chair. I cabled her agent to have her wear her native costume when she arrived. Then I rented a sedan chair, and engaged a troupe of Arab acrobats as bearers. I planned to keep them carting the lady around during her entire engagement.

"When the steamer arrived, I was at the pier with the Arabs and the sedan chair. A battery of newspaper cameras were waiting to photograph the scene. But instead of being dressed in native costume, the dancer was dressed in the latest Paris style! And she refused absolutely to enter the sedan chair. What! Get into that thing? Not she! A limousine for her.

"These publicity stunts are the high lights in a press agent's job; but they don't come often. In between, there is a steady stream of plain hard work, seizing every possible chance of rousing people's interest. 'Blossom Time,' for example, is based on the life of Franz Schubert, the great composer. Weeks before the opening, I sent letters to all the musical societies and private schools. I saw that the papers were supplied with material about Schubert, about the operetta itself, and the cast. And immediately after the first night, the societies, clubs and schools were circularized again, with reviews of the play.

"There is one form of publicity about which the actors and actresses are always fighting. There are different ways of presenting an actor's name in connection with a production. This applies to the paid advertisments, the programs, and the billboards. For ex ample, if the star has become so famous that he has more 'pulling power' than the production itself, his name is put at the top, even above the name of the play, and also in larger letters. The next step is to have the star's name in the same size letters as the title. The third uses the same form, but the star's name is in smaller letters than the title of the play. Next is what is called a featured position,' with the name of the production first, and then the name of one or two of the stars.

"I don't know whether the average playgoer notices the details of this scale of prominence. But believe me, the actors are ready to fight, bleed, and die to get the type and position they think they are entitied to. Every detail concerning the position of the name and the size of the letters is covered in the contract signed by the manager and the actor. Mr. Shubert recently made a contract with a star actor, and it contained no fewer than seven clauses relating to the details of how the star's name should appear in the program and in the advertising and billing."

T

Passion Week in Paris, 1918

Condensed from The Dearborn Independent (March 27, '26)
William L. Stidger

HERE is no better time to tell it
than this Passion Week of 1926,
after eight years have passed.
Friday, March 22, a week before
Good Friday, the Big Gun began to
fire on Paris. My diary of that date
says:

"This is the first day on which a gun has been used by the enemy to fire a distance of 75 miles on a defenseless city filled with men, women and children. The city is stirred as never before since the days of the French Revolution. Business has stopped. Shops are closed. The tramways and subways are motionless. None but Americans are on the streets of Paris. There is something dreadfully ominous in the very air. The awful uncertainty of those great shells dropping, regularly every 12 minutes from out of the sky, seemed to stiffle one. At first we did not know whether they were bombs from Gothas Cr what. Then came the announcement late this afternoon that the shells are coming from the Big Gun."

Saturday, March 23 "Promptly at 7 the Big Gun dropped Its first shell for today into the city. It shattered some glass in my hotel. We had an air raid again last night. Up yonder on the Somme the Big Drive has begun, and down here the air drive has begun. The Big Gun all day long and the Gothas at night. It is intended to terrify.

"Every 12 minutes the shells have dropped into the city. The railroad depots are literally crowded with people leaving the city with their children. I visited three gares today and baggage is piled up everywhere. I talked with a man in charge about the possibility of checking a trunk for a friend who had to go to Bordeaux, and be said that they would not promise

to touch it for two weeks, because of the great exodus from the city of old men, and women and children. They were overwhelmed."

Sunday (Palm Sunday), March 24

"Another air raid last night, and the Big Gun promptly at seven this morning. It is a strange Palm Sunday. The papers are filled with the awfulness of the loss of life up on the Somme line. It looks dark. Bishop McConnell preached a Palm Sunday sermon and told us that he had spoken in the past week to a thousand Scottish guards the day before the big drive began. When he asked them what they wanted to sing they selected

us

'O God, Our Help in Ages Past, Our Hope for Years to Come.' The Bishop told that he had preached to those boys on 'How Men bie,' and in a few days most of them had made the supreme sacrifice.

"While the Bishop was preaching three shells fell so close to the church that their explosion shook the windows. The newspapers humorously called it 'Bomb Sunday'."

Tuesday, March 26

"The Germans have taken Noyon, only 35 miles away. We have been notified as to where we shall get truck transportation in case the city is evacuated. Hand baggage only, allowed. I visited the Gare du Nord today. It is piled to the ceiling with the baggage of old men and women fleeing Paris. I saw old men and women in wheel chairs by the hundreds, men and who have never been out of Paris in their lives. The Big Gun stopped shelling us for some reason this afternoon. We do not hear much news from the front, but we know that awful slaughter is going

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''Never such a Passion Week since Christ!' one hears exclaimed on every side. That phrase seems to be on every lip. There are such strange parallels. The world seems to be betrayed this week. It looks as if the French and English armies will be separated and the channel ports taken. We say in our hearts that it shall not be, but we have to face facts."

Good Friday, March 29

"I have never spent a Good Friday in my life when I felt more in the atmosphere and memory of Christ's sufferings than I have today. In addition to the poor refugees with whom I worked all day and night, the piteousness of their suffering haunting me, I spent half an hour in the Made

The churches Half of the

leine this afternoon. are crowded today. French who are pouring into them are wearing black. Thousands of women and little children with weeping eyes passed me as I stood at the steps of the Madeleine. This morning before daylight I came home from an all-night's work with the refugees. I stopped at a church where working men gather and it was packed to the doors.

woman.

"One of the refugees that we took to the hotel last night was an old We had to put the refugees to bed on the floor of the hotel lobby at the Pavilion. This dear old lady somehow lost her crucifix, and she wailed and cried and shrieked so that she kept the rest of the tired refugees awake. We could not quiet her. Finally she got the whole crowd of more than 200 refugees searching for that lost crucifix, until at last they found it and all could sleep.

"This afternoon the sky was cov ered with heavy black clouds to the north. One imagined that it was the dense smoke from the big guns up on the Somme and around Noyon. The clouds drifted over Paris as from a burning world. A great air patrol was circling overhead. The Germans had been threatening a daylight raid for some time, and as they seemed to prefer sacred days for their terror, it Full churches was expected today. make good targets.

"About three o'clock I left the crowded Madeleine, to walk to my hotel. I was thinking of Good Friday in America-of my church folks-my family-all keeping worship. The Big Gun had been silent most of the day, but suddenly I heard an explosion. It was the Big Gun. The earth shook with convulsions.

"Then the news came. It spread

The shell

like wild fire over Paris. had struck the ancient and beautiful church of St. Gervais. Hundreds of people were kneeling in the church, and 75 were killed. More than a hundred others were terribly wounded. What I saw there will haunt me forever."

W

My 92 Years

Condensed from Current History (April '26)

Chauncey M. Depew

HEN I was a boy in Peekskill, N. Y., the ambitious man thought of fortune in terms of $100,000. If he could acquire so monumental a sum it would bring him $7,000 a year at 7 per cent, and $3,000 was adequate for his living. That included a coach and pair and two or three servants. We did not undertake to do such a variety of things in a brief space of time, but we lived comfortably, and the average man's chance of happiness was brighter then than now. The pressure of latter-day life tends to rob us of the capacity for happiness. We forget to smile, and of all human blessings a smile is the greatest.

Trains in those days crept slowly down to New York, though we regarded them as fast enough. Paddlewheel steamboats ran to Europe and the railroads slowly progressed westward. Our newspaper in Peekskill often published "three-day news from Europe," meaning that the vessel bringing this news had arrived in New York three days before.

When we come to speak of changing social conditions it may not be amiss to recall that my first fee was $1.75, earned by several days of work in preparing a legal opinion. For a

young man just out of Yale the fee
was looked upon as adequate. Since
I have ventured to say that a smile
is the greatest blessing in life, I may
add that an appreciation of money in
its true value and provision against
Poverty is the first duty of man.
Riches should not be a goal, but pov-
erty is the worst of our social evils.
The first $100 cleared from my prac-
tee went into a savings bank and
till remains there, amounting to al-
Dost $900 in sixty years.

The outstanding discussion that oc-
upled everybody's mind in the '40s

and '50s was the question of property rights as applied to slaves. At the time I was graduated from Yale in 1856 this difference had reached the pro. portions of a breach. I entered actively into the campaign that elected Lincoln.

When the civil war was ended and the question of slavery decided, the great social question became the treatment that should be accorded to the South. Extremists upon the victorious side argued that the defeated states should never receive the full measure of their former rights. Others of more moderate opinion held that such rights could be returned only by degrees. A few men expressed the view that the status of the Southern States must be restored at once.

Of that group Lincoln was the outspoken leader, insisting upon a full restoration, saying in effect that these were our people and that we could not debar them from the Union in which they were forced to be citizens. Had Lincoln lived, his policies would have prevailed, to the early benefit of the South. But the death of Lincoln made way for the carpetbagger, and it was not until the Presidency of Grant that the vision of Lincoln received substance.

Once the two great divisions of the country had been fully reunited in a political whole and the West had begun to develop, the prosperity of the country passed all known bounds. The cloud upon this prosperity was the recurrence of panics. As the great accumulations of capital were shifted about in new combinations and still greater enterprises became the order of the day, panic followed panic, with recurrent periods of depression and suffering. Happily we have seen the passing of panics, owing in large

measure to our improved banking system under Federal control.

Our material welfare now exceeds that of any generation before us, but the soul starves. The foundations of faith are shaken. Readers of the creed deny its teachings. We carry criticism too far, and the analytic spirit is rampant. We are like children who dissect that which makes them happy until the sawdust pours from the doll. The age is merciless to its idols and the revered things of the past.

My ninety-two years from 1834 to 1926 have no parallel in recorded time. The inventions, discoveries and achievements of these nine decades have reconstructed the world. But the one work which marks the age above all others is emancipation. In no other period of history have there been such contributions to freedom. When Christ undertook His mission more than half the world was held in bondage.

In the last ninety years emancipation has been extended to almost every remaining slave. Freedom in the United States has released a whole race; millions of serfs were redeemed in Russia.

But the greatest benefit of emancipation has been the growth of democratic governments. Divine right has disappeared, and with it the inherited tyranny of the Romanovs, the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns and Bourbons.

The next ninety years of human progress will witness changes that may well make the events of my lifetime seem of slight consequence by comparison. I am not disturbed by the religious controversy that shakes the land, or by the great powers of capital and labor. I believe that the ninety years to come will bring wide peace among nations, a spirit of mu tual helpfulness, a growth of industry and commerce beyond previous conceptions. I hope that the world will depart in some measure from the present slavish tendencies to make mechanical things the rule of life; that it may pause for a bit of real joy and understanding.

Often I am asked to explain the rule of long life and happiness. I have found it simple enough. As a boy I remember that my grandfather and my own father were given to worry; I might say that worry killed them, and in my youth this destroying spirit of worry aggravated my peace. Then I resolved to worry no more, to live each day of life as it dawned before me, but to put forth my best efforts that the one following might be bet ter. I never sought riches, and twice lost my fortune. Neither have I avoided riches, endeavoring at all times to raise a bulwark of independ ence against the troubles of life.

When the temptation to rest comes upon me, I defeat it by rising and stirring. I find as keen a pleasure in life as ever. I do not indulge the inclination of age to look backward and live in the past. Upon the contrary, I cultivate an interest in every new thing and read the daily papers with care; they always offer someI make thing new to the mind. friends with the young, who bring me the impulses of youth, the desires of ambition. Some of my best friends are the sons and grandsons of men with whom I went to college.

It is one of the dangers of age to seek isolation, to avoid new faces and new things. Persons of advanced years who fall into this groove soon think of the past alone. Their minds stagnate, and every fresh thought is rejected. No man ever grew old until his mind became weary and surfeited. Age is really not so much a matter of years as of the spirit, and I am determined to keep step with the times. When I was fifty my friends and other well-wishers began advising me to rest and take life easily, but I never yielded to that advice. About my only concession to rest is a ten-minute nap in the afternoon. I am confident of liv ing to complete a century of life. After that I shall leave the rest to Provi

dence.

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