Harold Roe Bartle - Personality

Personality

Bartle was a hail-fellow-well-met, who "never knew a stranger" and demonstrated an impressive recall of names. On Christmas, he would regularly spend the day visiting orphanages, the Boy's Home, the city jail, and other places that might be overlooked on such a holiday. For most of his life, Bartle lived simply, becoming more expansive in his personal spending only after being elected mayor. (His greatest extravagance until that point was fine cigars, of which he smoked 25 per day.)

Bartle idolized his clergyman father and displayed some guilt for not having followed in his profession. Bartle continued to make major decisions only after deciding what his father would have done in a similar circumstance. But Roe Bartle hated the penury of the clergyman's life. The first time he asked a girl for a date, she rejected him because he was dressed in ill-fitting, second-hand clothes. Crushed, he swore before a mirror, "hand upraised," that no child of his would ever know poverty. But once he had the money, he also acquired expensive hand-tailored suits.

Kansas City Star editor Roy A. Roberts was puzzled by Bartle, "You can say almost anything you like about Roe Bartle—call him demagogue, opportunist, tycoon or dedicated saint—and you will be correct, but you will speak only half truths. Nobody knows Bartle. He is too complex to be figured out."