Judge Gary was an easy man to work with because he was so interested in following his own story. He had been too busy all his life to give attention to the route by which he had come. Now he enjoyed the looks back. Finding that he was willing to take literally his promise to open records and answer questions, I laid out a little plan for covering his life chronologically. It pleased him, for he was the most systematic of men. It gave him delight to remember. “How a man’s mind unravels!” he exclaimed one day when he had suddenly recalled something long forgotten. Our interviews were carried on always at 71 Broadway. He kept his appointments exactly. Rarely did he keep me waiting, and if by necessity he did he always apologized. If I came late I was made to feel clearly that that was a thing not to be done. While Judge Gary was prepared to be frank in his talks with me he was not prepared to be misquoted. He evidently had learned that even with the best intentions a reporter may distort what a man has said out of all resemblance to what he meant. He guarded against this by always having at our interviews a secretary who took down in shorthand all that he said, all that I said. I made longhand notes, dictating them as soon as I went back to my desk. I do not remember that a question of misunderstanding of meaning ever came up. Convinced that the Gary Code was genuine, not mere window dressing for the public, nothing interested me more than how a man in his fifties who had been for twenty years a successful corporation lawyer was willing to preach to Wall Street as he had done. I finally concluded the truth to be that Elbert Gary had never outgrown his early bringing up. He had never gotten over a belief in the soundness of what he had learned in Sunday school and of what later he had taught through most of his manhood in Sunday school. The difference between him and some of his fellows in business brought up in the same way was that he insisted that the Sunday-school precepts of honesty, consideration for others, fair play, should be preached on week days as well as Sundays, in the board room as well as the church. If he ever sensed that his preaching was both comic and irritating to Wall Street—which I doubt—he never gave sign of such a perception. I soon found that I need not hesitate to bring him all sorts of criticisms of his doings as I unearthed them in studying the public’s reactions to the Steel Corporation’s operations. They never fretted or irritated him; rather he enjoyed analyzing them for my benefit. He never dismissed radical opinions as nonsense. In the year I was working with him there was never a public radical meeting in New York—and there were a good many of them that year—that he did not read all the speeches, and comment on them intelligently and with good humor.