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and do anything. His enthusiasms carried him to extremes of behavior at times. He would make silly jokes. I don't think of him as a clown or a fool, or did I ever. I think it was excessive Italian emotionalism. He had to be expressive all the time, had to express things with his hands, his head, his gestures, as well as with what he had to say. That made him appear peculiar. I don't recall ever having thought him peculiar, except that after he was mayor I do know that he did some things that I thought were very funny. He would do these extreme things and take these extreme positions. He could be troublesome and butt in on things that were none of his business. As Secretary of Labor we had the matter well in hand and then the mayor would turn up having his own solution operating just as though we weren't already there and telling us what to do. That was where there was a strike, or something, going on. He was terribly interested in strikes. He couldn't keep his hands off them, just as he was interested in fires and couldn't keep his hands off them. I don't know that he ever did any good, but he relieved himself by taking a position. He took a pretty radical position and at the outset he always thought that the labor people were right about everything. That was his tradition. He'd grown up in a period where they got the worst end of it, so he was going to give them the best end of it.