Show bights of ke w torf yo rk a by y WALTER TRUMBULL it always liti beeL beean lIed tl to EO lue u new and increasing marvel that a person la in new york can take a telephone receiver off the hook book and in a moment be talking to some one in san francisco yet that great invention of mr bell which permits us to speak in a natural voice over thousands of miles la is not an nn an mixed bussing there la isa a man mail of manhattan whose telephone Is not beside his bed but across the room not long ago he was wakened to in the middle of the night by a most persistent ringing of the bell rising in the dark he be made his sleepy way toward the telephone lione in some manner he caught one foot under the rug and plunging forward brought his other foot into violent contact with a chair breaking a toe as was afterward discovered nevertheless erth eless this spartan utter uttering lug language to be sure hopped painfully to the telephone and grasped the rc receiver it was the wrong number 0 0 1 in a restaurant in grand central station there Is a waiter who used to work at jacks th other morning he find and I 1 talked of that place of lamented memory of the nights when you could find there such notables as rex beach fred stone T A dorgan and all the rest of that old time throng jacks said the former employee was like that place in parts paris of which they always talk it if you stayed there long elou enough gh you would see bee everybody who was anybody in the world there la Is no place like it now in a week id average in tips Those days are gone that was a lot of dough then and it would be more right fight now 1 I well remember the first time I 1 eier saw EL a 1000 bill and I 1 have not seen many since A little fellow who was sitting in the back room gave it to me to pay a check that totaled less than seven dollars the cashier certainly looked hard at that bill before he got the money out of the safe to make mabre change who gave me the bill well you might have bare heard of him his name was arnold rothstein one of the cost most interesting and remarkable persons la in new york manages inan an agency totally blind lie runs the ollice by himself this means that lie he opens the safe runs two adding machines operates two tivo typewriters and answers and uses three dial telephones ile he also keeps a card index there are many blind men and women who do similar things through some adaptation of the braille system the system of jitsue little raised dots the remarkable thing about this man Is that except in the case of the index and of dots in ills his watch he does the whole thing by memory la in other words in the matters of typewriting machines adding machines and dial telephones he uses the touch system he remembers anything said to him on the telephone including house and street numbers long elou enough b to type them and then remembers the location of the type written notes so that he always gives the proper memorandum to the particular outside man tie he selects tor for the job his ear tells him which telephone rings and which outside man has entered the office ile he wears dark glasses andio sure are his movements that customers frequently come in and go out again without knowing he la Is blind he also can play thu the piano by the couell system once he played in a place in which legs diamond had on an interest it still owes him ills his last weeks salary there Is one on thing t which makes a adeep deep impression oo on every distinguished visitor who comas comes to new york if they have not experienced it before and often when they have they invariably speak of it IL I 1 am referring to their rides behind a motorcycle escort owing to the limited size of manhattan island and the number of 0 automobiles which dally daily travel its streets the traffic situation Is something to write home about yet a good motorcycle escort wilt will take a distinguished visitor from harlem to the battery at an average speed of about shirts miles per hour some distinguished visitors grow pale and shut their eyes some merely hold bold on to anything they can reach and do ghost braking for the driver or curl up their toes A few are either fatalists or else so phlegmatic that they sit relaxed and show no reaction to a street car missed by an inch or a flake ol of paint flicked from a truck 10 1932 bell service |