Had they been interview, some people who figured in last week's news might have related certain of their doings as follows:
Alfred E. Smith, Governor of New York: "Followers of law and politics have often observed that the question of pardon is one of a governor's most serious problems, as one pardon inevitably leads to a host of applications for others. Last week I was presented with 10,000 signatures urging clemency for Brooklyn Patrolman John J. Brennan, 28, condemned to the electric chair. On Jan. 2 one Samuel Krainen, shopkeeper, called at a Brooklyn police station, and identified Brennan as one who had created a disturbance in his shop when drunk. As a sergeant was thereupon removing Brennan's shield, Brennan fired a revolver at Krainen, killing him. Last week, during the long day preceding the hour for his electrocution, Brennan kept asking his guard: 'Is there any news yet from Albany?' But I sent no word. He was electrocuted."
Charles M. Schwab, (Bethlehem Steel): "In Baltimore, I addressed 800 members of the Association of Commerce at a dinner tendered me in recognition of the wealth I have brought the city with my Sparrows Point steel plants, of which the payrolls now total 25 millions per annum. I told them that I had just consented to spend two millions on my dry docks in Baltimore and had no single interest in the city to which I was not ready to devote every dollar I could borrow. I said that in ten years Baltimore would eclipse even Pittsburgh as a steel centre. 'Some of you,' I said, 'thought I was dreaming when I spoke in 1916 of our plans for Sparrows Point. You have seen them realized. . . . You will see this dream of mine tonight come true when, ten years hence, I come again among you.' "
Samuel Matthews Vauclain, President Baldwin Locomotive: "Since Nov. 1 hundreds of thousands of Baldwin Locomotive shares have been bought and sold on the stock exchanges. During a brief day last week 44,000 shares changed hands. This is mysterious because only 200,000 Baldwin Locomotive shares exist, and of these only 30,000 to 35,000 are floating on the market. The situation carried the stock from 117 on Nov. 1 to 163% last week. Rumors sped. To one (that my concern will sell its Philadelphia real estate) I replied, 'Real estate is not on my brain. In the month of November I took orders for four miles of locomotives and my job is to build them.' There was another rumor of a stock market corner in Baldwin. I laughed; 'The only corners I know of in Baldwin are the four corners on every Baldwin stock certificate.' I was wrong, for Arthur W. Cutten, quiet calculator in Chicago, had built a corner in Baldwin. Newspapers reputed his profits to be $10,000,000."
Joseph E. Widener, Philadelphia millionnaire art collector: "Directly following the marriage last week of my daughter, Fifi (see p. 32) it was reported from Manhattan that my agent had purchased, for $100,000, a rug once belonging to the late Sultan Abdul Aziz of Turkey. The rug has a background of moss-green creepers, with orange-red stems, among which deer, gazelles, sheep, goats are pursued by lions and leopards.* There is a centre medallion of rose-crimson, with vine traceries in pink and silver around four hawklike birds."