Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 126, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 May 1914 — GIVER OF PASSPORTS [ARTICLE]

GIVER OF PASSPORTS

Negro Aid in the State Department Long in Service. Presents Algara With Papers and Was In U. S. Employ 44 Years Ago —Called “Alpha and Omega” of Spanish War. Washington, D. C. —When Eddie Savoy, the veteran negro messenger at the state department, delivered Mexican Charge Algara his passports be performed that responsible mission lor the third time since he came to the department in Hamilton Fish's day, forty-four years ago. In this Instance as in the others Savoy was enjoined by the secretary of state to "bring back written evidence" of its safe receipt by the diplomat So he returned to the department with Charge Algara’s autograph Indorsement on the wrapper which had contained the passports. This the messenger will file away with scores of other souvenirs of his long association with the state department Savoy, who has seated diplomats at banquets, arranged them solemnly with due regard to precedence at state funerals and looked after their proper placing at all kinds of functions, first delivered passports to Sir Lionel Sack-ville-West, the British minister, who displeased President Cleveland toward the close of his first administration by interference in American politics.

The messenger's second mission was performed sixteen years ago, when he carried to the Spanish legation here the passports that gave Minister Luis Polo y Bernabe a safe exit from the United States upon the declaration of war with Spain. Among the diplomats at the state department "Eddie," as everybody calls him, is known as the Alpha and Omega of the Spanish war, for at its conclusion he accompanied the peace commissioners to Paris and melted the wax with which the peace treaty was sealed.