Coulee City dispatch. [volume] (Coulee City, Wash.) 19??-19??, 1937-04-22
NEUTRALITY-SUSPICIOUS.
| WHO'S NEWS
THIS WEEK.,
BY LemueI F. Parton
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Mr.. Dewey's Rat Trap.


Mr.. Dewey's Rat Trap.
NEW YORK.-Our Mr..
1 = Dewey seems to have made
a better rat trap than his neigh
Dor and the world beats path
to his door, with other cities
wanting to know how he does it.
The young rackets prosecutor,
ringing up seven more convictions,
for perfect score, has turned up
extortion totalling about $500, 000,-
600. He gets $16,695 a year. He
seems to be a good investment.
With possible maximum sentences
of 2,100 years against the seven res
taurant racketeers, he's already
drawing a bead on allied industrial
rackets.
Governor Lehman took Thomas
E. Dewey, now thirty-four years
old, from $4,000 law practice for
the biggest municipal dry-clean-
ing job Of modern history. First, he
put the panderers away, Charles
lucky Luciano and eight others;
then twenty eight loan sharks, with
their $4,000, 900 blood money rack
ct; then, with bit Of legal leger-
demain, he turned policy kings into
rats and put them away, too.
He moved on through the truck
ing, used brick, poultry, bakery,
electrical contracting, tenants and
chauffeurs' rackets, and each case
brought a shout of "front" to the
Sing-Sing bell-boys.
He comes from Owosso, in the
deep woods of Michigan. There,
as in Windy Gap, the sheriff is sup
posed to drive out or lock up the
crooks. Thomas E. Dewey seems
to have brought this quaint small
town idea to Manhattan. He rides
'em down.
His father ran a country news
paper and he was the printshop dew
il, working on nearby farms when
he was big enough. He expected
to be choir singer and it was his
baritone voice which won him
scholarship at Columbia. He was
a paid soloist at st. Matthew's and
st. Timothy's church in West
Eighty-fourth street.
Finishing in law at Columbia, he
engaged in private practice and
later joined the staff of George Me-
dale, U. S. district attorney. It
was 1888 when he roped Waxy Cor
don, one of the biggest and sleekest
of the rodent rodeo.
He is married to an Oklahoma
girl. They have one boy four years
old and another eighteen months.
When the Shooting Starts.
A FTER writing 40 books, E.
Phillips Oppenheinn, the Brit
ish novelist, complains that diplo-
matte intrigue-his favorite fiction
al theme-isn't what it used to be.
He knew the old patterns sufficient
ly to foresee events.
His novels, "The Mischief Max
err" "Our Great Secret. and ''The
Makers of History" predicted the
World war with almost perfect ac-
curacy in time and the alignment
of powers. Given certain num-
Der of diplomats, of standard spec
ifications, engaged in routine phe-
nagling over old, established pune
tilio, and he could figure out when
the shooting would start.
But that's all over, says Mr.. OPP
penheim, visiting this country for
the first time in ten years. Diplo-
mats call names and tell all they
know, and more, on the radio, and
the laggard novelist shouts 'Wait
for baby!" as they touch off more
deviItries than he can invent.
At the age of seventy-one, the
genial, sturdy Mr.. Oppenhein is
one of the few writers who can man
two dictaphones at once, keeping a
novel racing through each of them
without stopping for water or feed.
Caesar could work three stenog-
raphers at once, if this reporter re-
members his high school Latin cor
rectly, but it was a lost art until
Mr.. Oppenheim and the late Edgar
Wallace came along. There was
talk of staging a debating race
between them when they both lived
at Nice.
Mr.. Oppenheim has been writing
fifty-one years, although his first