strong box office appeal, and he had written and produced a new play called Sam Houston, a venture in which he was associated with John McGovern and Jesse Edison. He was working in one play after another: In Hampton Roads, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Bells, The Southern Gentleman and Ping Pong. In 1910, while at the zenith of his career, it suddenly ended. He was in Kansas City, Missouri, impersonating the difficult character of the Drain Man in the play entitled The Servant of the House, a production of the Henry Miller Associated Players Company, when he was fatally stricken with uremic poisoning. He died in Paris, Texas, and was buried there. He left a son, Clement Geiger Jr., who resides in New York City and is known as Clay Clement, Jr. He is connected with the radio and television business.

Before closing this sketch, we should like to tell an apocryphal story concerning one of Clay Clement's early rehearsals. He was a hard man to please. To him, a sound effect was more than an effect; it represented the very apex of human ingenuity. One of the plays called for a thunderstorm, and in the rehearsal a stage hand was having difficulty in producing the kind of thunder that Clement demanded. Time and again he tried, employing all tricks known and several previously unknown. So preoccupied was Clement with his seemingly futile task of making his frantic helper create exactly what he wanted that he was oblivious to a rising storm outside. Suddenly there came a crash of thunder that was a corker.

"No, no!" roared Clement. "That's not it yet!"

Leaving the noisemaking paraphernalia and stepping out from behind the stage props, the exhausted stagehand strode up to Clement and hissed: "That was real thunder you just heard! Why, God Almighty himself can't please you!"

Although Harry Dewitt Cook did not live in El Paso, he did move from a farm near Hudson into Kappa, and his post-war activities from 1865 to 1871 had a direct bearing on veterans of the area. A native of New York state, he came to Hudson in 1851, and was living in Kappa shortly after the railroad came through and established the town where he became a grain dealer and station master. By 1860 he had extensive land holdings in both McLean and Woodford Counties, and success came his way in politics too. The election of November 1860, which sent Lincoln to the White House, also sent Harry D. Cook into the Illinois General Assembly as a member from the Forty-second District. No sooner had the session convened, when the Civil War was declared. Harry Cook left the legislature to become the captain of Company "G" which represented Woodford County in the Fourth Illinois Cavalry, a unit formed by Col. T. Lyle Dickey at Ottawa in August, 1861. Attaining the rank of major, Cook was mustered out of the service in 1864 after thirty-nine months of campaigning.

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