Most conspicuous among the men associated with Belasco throughout his long career in management was Benjamin Franklin Roeder, his general business representative and close personal friend, whose name is here fittingly linked with commemoration of the chief whom he so long and faithfully served. Mr. Roeder, originally, aspired to be a dramatist, and during the early days of Belasco’s activity in New York, while connected with the Sargent School of Acting, he obtained an introduction to him from Franklin Sargent. Roeder had made a dramatization of the novel of “St. Elmo” (a subject which was successfully introduced on the stage many years later) and desired that Belasco should read his play with a view to its possible production. Belasco, pleased by the manner and address of the young writer, agreed to consider the matter and made an appointment to meet him and discuss it at the School office at one o’clock on the following Sunday afternoon. In the stress of business he forgot that appointment, but an urgent errand taking him to his office at eleven o’clock on the night of the specified day he found Roeder seated on the doorstep, asleep. He had been waiting there ten hours. “When I asked him why he had waited,” said Belasco, telling me of this incident, “he answered, ‘You said you might be late--and to wait.’ I made up my mind then that there was surely a place for a boy so tenacious and that he was just the fellow for me. I took him on, at first as my secretary, and he has been my business assistant, sometimes my bulwark, always ‘my friend, faithful and just to me,’ ever since.” Members of the theatrical profession are almost without exception indiscreet and garrulous; secrecy, which often would be invaluable in that profession,--as in any calling in which success frequently depends on priority in exploitation of ideas which cannot be protected from imitation,--is almost unknown in it. Roeder unites in himself not only fidelity to his [Illustration: Photograph by White. Belasco’s Collection. BENJAMIN F. ROEDER, BELASCO’S GENERAL BUSINESS MANAGER] employer, tenacity of purpose, familiarity with all the commercial details of theatrical affairs, but also excellent executive faculties, directness and celerity in the despatch of business and, on all subjects, the restful reticence of the reclusive clam. His services were often invaluable to Belasco. * * * * *