Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1911-04-02
! CIT. The hero, eleven years old, lands
I ~ in Chicaqo goes hungry while he looks

ACT II. He becomes journalist with
national reputation and travels with Iheo-
dore Roosevelt and William H. Taft.
ACT III. He is made Assistant Secretary
of the Treasury and the right hand man OF
Mr.. MacVeagh.
The hero is Robert o. Bailey, who is
quite bald, very brainy and as full of hustle
as setter dog after flock of partridges in
thick clump of bushes. Bailey has been a
hustler all his life, sort of rustling, busting
person with well defined ideas OF what he
wanted and clear cut notions on how to OBJ
tain his object. He wrote, staged, produced,
and acted the three-act drama of his career as
it is set forth at the beginning OF this article,
and he did it without the aid OF prompter,
putting in his spare moments shifting his
own scenes and handling his own props.
He was born in Stephenson County, Hi
nois; but by the time he was eleven years
old he had lived also in Arkansas, New York.
and Ohio. Surveying the world and all its
WAYS from the altitude of his eleventh year,
he decided to make his own living and to
waste no time about getting a start. He
arrived in Chicago with nothing to feed
upon but ambition, determination, and sew
eral other commodities of this kind which
can be neither cooked nor converted into
real food 1t took him four days to get
Job, and in that time he had nothing to eat;
meaning that the first scene in the play was
excruciating and tragic.
Then he went to work with vengeance.
He secured position as messenger boy
and made an agreement with the principal
of a stenography school that, in return for
being trained as a shorthand writer, he
would sweep out the school building and
keep it in order.
81 can't teach stenography to children"
said the teacher after surveying the ambi-
tious eleven-year-old.
Eight months later this remark was
amended, as follows, Robert, you know all
the stenography can teach you"
Bailey's next move was westward. lie
shifted the scenes to San Francisco, and
filled several positions, earning as much as
twenty dollars a month, and ending by
learning nearly all there was to be known
about printing. Although he was an expert
stenographer, he never held a stenographer's
position, and, strange to say, what he learned
about the business when he was eleven
years old has never deserted him. Without
any special practice he has retained it all.
1t did not take him long to decide that he
had no desire to be a printer all his life, and
he began the second act of his play by max
ing bee line for Washington, where he in
tended to become writer dealing with polit-
ical and national affairs. He walked into
Capital, said he had never done any news
paper work, but affirmed his belief that he
could succeed at it. He was turned down
cold; but the next day he reappeared in the
office with the declaration that he was going
to work for nothing.
That very day the city editor said,
sBailey, 60 up to the Capitol and write a
good story about the debate in the House"
He had never been in the Capitol; but
his gift for sensing news and his old expert
ness at stenography were the beginning of
his fame as a newspaper writer. When he
turned in that story, he was employed and
given good salary. This was in 1897, and
in 1903 he joined the Washington bureau of
the Associated Press. With this organization
he covered" the White House, accompanied
both Roosevelt and Taft on their trips, and
at one time had charge of all the associations
work in the Departments of State, War, and
Navy.
When the present administration opened,
the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr.. Mac
Veagh, was looking for private secretary.
He hit on Bailey, whose hurry-up manner
of working showed that he was cut out for
something more than the job offered. Now
he succeeds Charles D. Hilles as Assistant
Secretary Of the Treasury, position that