Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 105, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 May 1913 — HAPPENINGS THE CITIES An Unscared Westerner Breaks New York’s Ice [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HAPPENINGS THE CITIES

An Unscared Westerner Breaks New York’s Ice

NEW YORK.—Jimmy Thompson blew into town not long ago from the west His home town isn’t so big that its people hare forgotten how to be kindly and courteous. They're not too busy to be polite. “So I’m used to being treated as though I were a white male with no risible shackles,*’ said Mr. Thompson. “Foolish of me, of course, but when one of these flve-rooms-and-a-bath New Yorkers with a forehead bo narrow yon could sharpen a lead pencil with It, makes signs and allusions as though I were an escaped convict Fm apt to pasß rapidly into hysteria. For three weeks he told snlppish office boys all about his own private business. The other day he went to an office to do g favor for its manager, A friend, far away in Wisconsin, had asked him to do so. He told the office boy all about It, and gave his name and his friend’s name, and some of the particulars of the kind act he had planned. Then he waited. After a Jong time the buzzer sounded. “So I went to the private office,” said James Thompson, free and unscared Westerner. “At a whale of a

big desk clean across the room I saw a little, flabby guy sitting. He never looked up at all. Just wept on looking down his nose and scratching away with his pen. And me there to do him a good turn, mind you! After mebbe two minutes, while I could feel the steam rising in the guage, he grunts at me. Never looks up. Just grunts. " ‘I didn’t understand you,’ I said. “ ’Whadda yuh want?’ says he, real sharp. ‘Speak quick. I’m very busy.’ “And all the time he didn’t look up. So I Just hollered a little low holler, and went over there to that flabby, little man and put my hand on the back of his industrious little head and shoved his intelligent little nose down down against the blotter. And then I went away;—But I didn’t get any real satisfaction out of it. I know from the way that sincere little cuss looked at me as I backed oil that he is Just a regular New Yorker. He didn’t know that ? he was a doggoned impudent, cold blooded little pup. He probably thinks that he was assaulted by a dangerous maniac. “And may be I would be considered a maniac by the class of New Yorkers to which this alleged business man belongs. But how such people manage to make a living, and pass themselves off as real human beings, is beyond my understanding. In do know, though, that they would never get away with that kind of stuff out west where real red blood flows through the veins of the people.”