Mr. Roosevelt, leaning over the side of the stand, queried, also in German:
“Here I am. What will you, comrade?”
The astonished German when it dawned upon him that Roosevelt had heard him, raised his hat and shouted: “Hurrah for Roosevelt!” Roosevelt’s good humor caught the crowd. The cheer was repeated and the demonstration turned to one for the commissioner instead of against him.
On one occasion when Roosevelt was on a night tour of investigation, he walked around a certain beat three times without being able to find his man. Just as he was about to leave, a quarrel occurred in a cafe and the owner came out on the sidewalk and knocked with a stick as a signal that he needed police protection. Three times he rapped, but the policeman did not come. Roosevelt heard him say:
“Where in thunder is the scoundrel sleeping? He should have told me that he had given up sleeping in the barber shop so that I could have found him.”
The next morning the policeman received a summons to headquarters to explain why he had changed his sleeping place.
It is also told of Roosevelt that an anti-Hebrew lecturer, intending to denounce Jews, asked for police protection at a lecture. The protection was promised and sent—thirty Hebrew policemen, whose presence so awed the speaker that his lecture became quite tame.
The attachment of members of the Jewish race for Roosevelt was illustrated at his funeral. The one man who was permitted to sit alone in the trophy room at Sagamore Hill, with the body of the Colonel, was Lieutenant Otto Raphael of the New York Police Force, a Hebrew of the East side. Mr. Roosevelt, in his biography, describes Raphael as “a powerful fellow with a good-humored face. He and I were both ‘straight New Yorkers,’ to use the vernacular. To show our community of feeling and our grasp of the facts of life, I may mention that we were almost the only men in the Police Department who picked Fitzsimmons as a winner over Corbett.”
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