PERSONAL ESTIMATES 



From Rene Bache, of Washington, D. C.: 



That I should have enjoyed for a period of nearly twenty-five years 

 not only the friendship of Doctor McGee, but also his confidence and 

 esteem, is to me a matter of much pride. 



He was the only man I have ever known to whom I could go and 

 say "Give me an idea," with a confident expectation of getting one. 

 He would treat that foolish demand with seriousness, and often would 

 respond with a suggestion which I was able to turn into money. 



The ideas Doctor McGee gave me put thousands of dollars into 

 my pocket. I used to tell him that he had paid for the second story 

 of my house on Q street. 



This amused him. He was also amused when I told him that he 

 never could say a thing a second time as well as he could the first. 



Let me explain that the experienced newspaper man rarely takes 

 the trouble to put down verbatim the words of a person whom he 

 interviews. What he wants is facts and ideas; he can usually write 

 them better than the man interviewed can talk them. But with 

 Doctor McGee it was different. Not to take him verbatim was to 

 lose, so to speak, the efflorescence of his discourse. 



I am not a stenographer, and so I could not always keep up. I 

 would have to ask him to repeat a sentence which he just uttered. 

 But he never could put the matter as strikingly a second time. 



This was characteristic of the born talker. Doctor McGee wrote 

 well, but he talked much better than he,wrote. The task of compo- 

 sition hampered the utterance of his thoughts. In conversation he 

 would seize an idea and give it a twist which he himself a moment 

 later could not reproduce. 



Doctor McGee never lost a chance to help me. I never found him 

 so busy that he was not ready to put his work aside for my benefit. 

 He was always glad to help other people believing, as he did, that 

 the object of existence was by no means the pursuit of happiness, but 

 rather the pursuit of usefulness. It was not merely information (full 



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