Detective Wooldridge has been under fire over forty times, and it is
said that he bears a charmed life, and fears nothing. He has met with
many hair-breadth escapes in his efforts to apprehend criminals who,
by means of revolver and other concealed weapons, tried to fight their
way to liberty.
He has impersonated almost every kind of character. He has in his
crime hunting associated with members of the "400" and fraternized
with hobos. He has dined with the elite and smoked in the opium dens;
he has done everything that one expects a detective of fiction to do,
and which the real detective seldom does.
Wooldridge, the incorruptible! That describes him. The keenest,
shrewdest, most indefatigable man that ever wore a detective's star,
the equal of Lecocq and far the superior of the fictitious Sherlock
Holmes, the man who has time and again achieved the seemingly
impossible with the most tremendous odds against him, the man who
might, had such been his desire, be wealthy, be a "foremost citizen"
as tainted money goes, has earned the title given him in these
headlines. And if ever any one man earned this title it is Clifton R.
Wooldridge.
It is refreshing to the citizenship of America, rich and poor alike,
to contemplate the career of this wonderful man. It fills men with
respect for the law, with confidence in the administration of the law,
to know that there are such men as Wooldridge at the helm of justice.
The writer of this article has enjoyed intimate personal association
with the great detective, both in the capacity of a newspaper
reporter, magazine writer and anti-graft worker. The ins and outs of
the nature of the greatest secret service worker in Chicago, Clifton
R. Wooldridge, have been to me an open book. And when I call him
Wooldridge, the incorruptible, I know whereof I speak.
I have seen him when all the "influences" (and they are the same
"influences" which have been denounced all over the country of late)
were brought to bear upon him, when even his own chiefs were inclined
to be frightened, but no "influence" from any source, howsoever high,
has ever availed to swerve him one inch from the path of duty.