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Show DUNNE'S REPORTORIAL DAYS. "Writer of the Dooley Letters Not Much on Statistics. "I met Pete Dunne, the evergreen Mr. Dooley, at a fire in New York the other afternoon," said a Washington correspondent corre-spondent quoted by the Washington Post. "I had not seen him for a good many years. We worked together in Chicago about fourteen years ago. Pete was then just 21 years old, and I was three years older. I was city editor of one of the afternoon Chicago papers, and Pete was my star man. He could write a swift and flamboyant story about any old thing, but he never had much of an eye to detail and one of his weaknesses was his invariable neglect to get the damage and the insurance in-surance when he was sent out to 'cover' a fire. Threats, bulldozing, persuasion, bully-ragging nothing could seem to induce Dunne to bring in a fact or two about the destructiveness in dollars and the insurance on a fire. - He would frame up a babe of a yarn, describing the fire in general terms, but be could have written that without so much as leaving the office to take a look at the fire. "Well, when I saw him the other day, he was standing with the crowd on a street off Upper Broadway, looking at the smoke pour out of the windows of a big furniture store. I walked up behind be-hind him and clapped him on the back suddenly: " 'Hello, Pete,' I said. 'Have you got the insurance yet?' " 'Gosh, no!' he exclaimed quickly, wheeling around and recognizing me. 'Say, you look out for that end of It, will you? and I'll do the "lurid glares" and "lambent flames." ' "Then we adjourned to a place nearby, near-by, and extinguished a few inward flames of our own. From the slender stripling that he used to be in the old days, Mr.' Dooley is now a solid chunk of a smooth-faced chap, weighing about 180 pounds, if not more; but, in spite of his ruddy skin and clear Irish eyes, he isn't in good health, and hasn't been for five years, since he had a bad dose of typhoid fever. He hasn't got a single, solitary thing on earth but just money, if anybody should climb off a herdic to ask you. -His enormous revenue from Dooleyisms has been a whole lot supplemented during the past couple of years by the right kind of stock information. As Peter Dunne-Dooley Dunne-Dooley has one of his strong admirers in William C. Whitney, and as the two are frequently seen together motoring around New York in one of those any-figure any-figure devil wagons, it doesn't take much of a guess to figure out where the Archey Road delineator picks up his knowledge of the correct things to do in Wall street." |