Power Laureate

John E. Mack of Poughkeepsie, one-time Justice of the New York Supreme Court, is the original Roosevelt man. He picked Franklin D. Roosevelt as a candidate for the State Senate in 1910, nominated him for the Presidency in Chicago in 1932. For more than a year Judge Mack has been counsel to a joint legislative committee investigating New York State public utility holding companies. He it was who, after trying in vain for six months to locate Associated Gas & Electric's Howard Colwell Hopson, aptly quoted from The Scarlet Pimpernel last summer:

They seek him here, they seek him there.

Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.

Is he in heaven? Is he in hell?

That demmed elusive Pimpernel!

"The Scarlet Pimpernel hasn't a damned thing on Hopson," cried jolly Judge Mack.

Last week Judge Mack was busy probing the history of Long Island Lighting, a $132,000,000 holding and operating company controlled by Ellis Laurimore Phillips and three friends.

Horrid-sounding headlines were produced with two accusations: 1) officers and directors personally profited in the purchase of a big subsidiary; 2) in nine years the company paid $11,000,000 in dividends on an original investment of $3,000,000. But revelation-of-the-week was that Long Island's General Counsel Arthur J. (for nothing) Baldwin was a prolific rhymester.

In Lawyer Baldwin's file the committee's investigators unearthed a copy of a letter to the wife of Powerman Phillips, relating that as a boat gift Mr. Baldwin had sent her husband a bottle of Creme de Menthe with this jingle:

Why not try another tack? Forget Roosevelt, Maltbie,* Lehman, Mack,

Harden your heart until it's tough as flint

And drown your sorrows in Creme de Menthe. Promptly Judge Mack offered the investigating committee another candidate as its "poet laureate," reading from the works of their rate engineer, Robert C. Gilles: I'm rate engineer for the Mack Committee

At 10 East 40th, New York City. We try to show each little utility The lack of charm and utter futility Of being bad, and how to be good And stay on the path of rectitude. But if on that road they run amuck, We'll ride them down with the big Mack

truck !

Ruddy, elderly, grey-haired Lawyer Baldwin, who is a past president of the National Publishers Association, onetime vice president of McGraw Hill Publishing Co. and longtime personal counsel to the late Charles Francis Murphy, Tammany boss, was not content to leave his Creme de Menthe jingle as his sole recorded effort, though he says: "No man likes to be known as a poet." He sought and obtained permission to recite to the inquisitorial committee another verse:

. . . What a change has come about

since the good, old days of old When Alger wrote his books for boys;

inspiring tales he told. When no one thought success a crime;

And youth was taught to work and

climb;

There were no codes, relief, no N. R. A., And a man was free to fix his pay, Free to loaf, labor or snore, Oh, come ye back, ye days of yore, When the eagle perched on the mountain top,

And did not mope in the candy shop. Snapped Judge Mack irrelevantly: "You mean, oh, come ye back, ye days of yore, when you could put $3,000,000 in and filch back $11,000,000."

*Chairman Milo Roy Maltbie of the New York State Public Service Commission.

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