Chapter II: Part 2

As for Young Loch he kept up the Good Work full many a year and came to be most highly respected by his Fellow Citizens, including the President of the Enterprise Real Estate & Investment Company whose budding daughter Loch plucked off the rosebush of Love before his red-eared rivals got within a mile of the garden.

Loch was also beloved by Salesmen everywhere, for he never asked them for an Inside Five, a breakage allowance, or donation of Goods for a Church Fair Raffle.

And he always got through with The Boys in time for them to get away on the Four Forty-Five and see a good Show in the Big Town that night.

_The Lesson for Today:_ He who serves most is the King Pin.

HOT SKETCH NO. 8

THE EFFICIENCY EXPERT

THERE was a Piece of Cheese.

He wore a stand-up collar, broken-lot size, and had a/an Adam’s Apple that used to romp up and down the highway every time he swallowed.

Also he was the busiest bee in the swarm.

After supper each night he had to rush down to the Depot to see that the Railway Boys escorted the 7:12 in and out of the Town all right, and then he’d rush back to the Cigar Store to hear the phonograph play, and lay down a few sound rules on International Relations until the President of the First National Bank came in to buy his after-dinner cigar and it was time to lock up.

After that, he would tear madly over to the Kelly House and there drop a few pearls of wisdom before the Night Clerk while that dignitary was out at the curb cleaning the big tin cuspidors that had served in their day to emphasize many a heated argument between rival groups of local parliamentarians.

Ed Galloway was the name of our genius-in-the-cocoon and wherever Ed was to be found, you knew that something of importance was pending. He seemed to have a gift for being on the spot. If you saw him streaking up Mill Street, you might wonder where he was going, and he might wonder where he was going, but before he got a block away, a barn or something would be sure to catch fire just as he was passing it, or a horse get his hoof caught in the trace, or somebody would be driving a stake just a wee bit off center, and straightaway Ed Galloway would find an avenue for his services or advice. He was present everywhere but Church.

Of course there were certain narrow, quibbling spirits, just as there are in every hamletto, who objected to Ed always chiseling in on everything, but there were not lacking those who, like Jeff Webster, Sole Owner and Proprietor of Webster’s Bus Line, believed that Ed Galloway had pretty near the right hashish on things, nine times out of ten.

Away off somewhere in Thibet or in Sumatra there may have been some petty local question that Ed was not wisdomed-up on, but everything that took on the character of a national or international issue, he could discuss from basement to belfry. He was as much at home in the busy arena of Politics and Business as he was in the wide realm of Science and Philosophy.

There was one thing that Ed had in common with all great political leaders, whether they were fully aware of it or not. It was a positive, ultimatum-like tone in which he rendered his decisions in all cases, regardless of their importance to you, to him and/or to the world at large.

If, for instance, Ed happened to pass a cup of water from the Court House pump to the stranger within the gates, he would say: “That water, Sir, is the purest, freshest water in this here whole State.” He’d say it with a sweep of the arm that seemed to include not only the State but the whole Universe, neither of which territories had he ever canvassed.

And invariably the stranger, after drinking the ordinary every-day water from the ordinary every-day Court House pump, would smack his lips and agree with Ed and have another go at it.

Now everybody in every town of every State of every Nation says the same thing about the water of his particular pump, and there is nothing of news-value either in this observation on our part, or in the statement re pure water on the part of said kanoops the world over.

But whenever Ed Galloway up and said that water was pure, or the Tariff was doomed, or that Stocks would go to a New Low, or that we were going to have rain, you had a sense that here was a man who undoubtedly had a corner on all outstanding knowledge of the subject.

Ed’s words always carried a certain vanadium finality that clinched the case and demoralized rebuttal, but there was always left in the heart of the Vanquished a sort of half-formed desire to call Ed a liar on general principles, although with no hopes of course of proving it; for Ed was always there with The Figures, which he dug up out of the vasty deep of his Imagination to support his side of the case, while his opponent usually was equipped with nothing but a village vocab of short jerky monosyllables and a chew of tobacco.

One day Ed met the owner of the Plow Factory in the barber’s chair getting his chinchillas chipped and told him right off the keyboard that his plant was doing but 8-3/4 percent of the total plow business of the county.

The old wowser gasped like a gaffed sturgeon at this impertinent news and attempted to swing back more or less crushingly, but the lather got in his mixer, and so all he could do was to lie there and let Ed go ahead and throw the short-horn.

Ed proceeded to tell him exactly how many farms there were in the County, State and Nation, the acreage under cultivation, the average number of plows per farm, and so on.

And then Ed wheeled suddenly about, and pointing his finger accusingly at his be-lathered and outstretched victim, exclaimed: “How many of these four thousand three hundred and thirty-two plows did YOU sell in Crooked Creek County last year!”

The old man did not say so, but he as much as admitted that he was a dub at the facts of his own business, and later on when he was putting on his overcoat, and Jake the star wielder of the rasp was helping to pull his undercoat down where it didn’t belong, he turned around pseudo-casually to Ed and told him to drop around to the factory some afternoon and have a chat.

* * * * *

Now it so happened that the Young Man who had charge of the Sales and Advertising end of the Plow Factory was a very faithful and steady Young Man. His conduct was at all times “exemplary,” to coin a word.

Every morning as the Court House clock struck eight, he could be seen dismounting from his tin bicycle at exactly the same spot in front of the office door. He had never been late but one morning in his episcopalean life, and that was after a thick night at the Welfare Social when he went in too strong for the strawberry-whisp.

He was one of those Young Men you can always Rely Upon. You know the kind—always the same. He did the same thing this year that he did last year: (a) and at the same time: (b) and in the same place: (c) and in the same way.

The same Copy that stood in the Ads last year, stood in the Ads this year—and occasionally got tired and sat down in the valuable space.

All his letters to The Trade opened and closed the same way like a door—“Replying to yours” and “Hoping to have.”

He also wrote Weekly Letters to the Men on the Road and talked in the earnest, measured phrases of a requiem, about Punch and Pep and Live Wire. There was almost enough live wire in these salesmanic scintillations to singe the hair off an apple. After you got past the waxed opener beginning with the inevitable “Well Boys,” the stuff went like a warm home-brew.

There was another thing about this Young Man worthy of eulogy. He was one of those Model Employees who always pitch the ball so the Boss can hit it. Whenever the Old Man would ask him a question he would burst a blood-vessel straining to answer it so that it would stack four-square with what the O. M. thought about the matter.

To sum up, this young Sales and Advertising Manager of the hitherto tabulated Plow Factory, was, confidentially speaking, habitually scared to a pea-green that he would offend the Boss and lose his good hundred-dollar job.

* * * * *

That is why he never told Dear Boss about a/an Idea he had perfected for increasing Sales, and never dared slip it into operation on his own account either.

But that night when Ed Galloway met him coming from the Revival and began to ask him all kinds of questions about the factory and the plow business in general, so as to shape himself up strong for his coming interview with the Big Flash, the Young Man unsuspectingly opened up and told Ed all the things he could do for the Works if he were only given half a chance.

The next day Ed, primed like a new pump, blew out to the Factory. When he asked to see the Boss, all the little time-clock punchers in the place began to twitter and twutter. They knew Ed of old and logically concluded he was booking himself for a thorny turn-down. But he wasn’t.

The Boss told Ed to come right in and take a chair. Ed took it and brought it as close to the Boss’s desk as he could without rubbing it against the Old Man’s chest. Then he sat down on it and said he only had a couple of minutes to spare but would like to lay down briefly a plan he had worked out for building Sales.

And with that business-like prelim, Ed proceeded to put into concrete and fearless expression the very Idea that the Model Young Man had confided to him the night before.

The Old Man scowled pleasingly,—a token of endorsement, which, had it been directed to any regular inmate of the place, from the Manager down to the Office Roach, would have emboldened the Trusty to ask for a salary lift. But Ed Galloway preferred to ignore the democratic outburst and continued right on, just as if the Boss had told him to get out.

He adjusted his adams-apple, threw an effective knit-brow, and said that what We must first do was to find out Our strength in the Trade.

“The way to go about it,” he said, “is to first send out a return post-card to every farmer in Crooked Creek County asking him how he likes his Arrow Plow. Farmers are irish-loyal to any farm tool they like—see? They won’t exactly genuflect to it, but they’ll yell and wave and that sort of thing—see? And they love nothing better than to write letters to Firms.

“All right, then: if they are already using an Arrow Plow, they’ll say so all over the return post-card and up the margins. And if they’re using some other make of plow—see?—they’ll be just as proud to tell what plow it is. Get it?”

“Now then,” continued Ed, grabbing a pencil and commencing to figure on the Old Man’s shirt front, “the returns will be 90 percent easy—and from these returns we can get the Arrow’s actual strength as well as the strength of the Competition in the terry-tory, thus enabling us to focus first on the weak spots and then throw our whole force against our competitors’ strong-hold. Get me?”

* * * * *

Now there is no sane reason why this little tale should be dragged out to the length of a Turn Verein entertainment, and so we are not going on to tell you how the Boss got all het up over this and other plans that Ed Galloway got from the Model Young Lobster and then presented to The Boss, nor how Doc Boss finally gave Ed _carte blanche_ and things like that, and told him to go ahead and put the various campaigns through.

Nor are we going to mention the coincidental visit to the Plow Factory of an Advertising man from one of the big national agencies—a dashing, dynamic, daredevil, who would dare anything on somebody else’s money—and who mapped out for Ed Galloway an original and corking national campaign which Ed promptly submitted to The Boss as the child of his own brilliant brain, and which the Agency Man didn’t care a dam about so long as he scythed in his good old fifteen percent agency commission, and which went through with a whoop and proved to be one big snorting, pawing, red-nostriled, fiery success.

Nor are we going into a lot of yawny detail all about how the Factory rose from its musty Rip and became one of the greatest farm machinery organizations in the country and put up a mammoth electric sign so that passengers on the Limited could see “THE HOME OF THE ARROW PLOW,” and almost got news of its erection on the Associated Wire (dam the censors!) and how the Company stood up $500,000 against Andy Carnegie’s $500 for a Library for the Town, and got new engraved letterheads showing a birds-eye of the whole town as the factory with the name of Edward Galloway as General Sales & Advertising Director.

All we are going to mention is that in time Ed put off the straight-stand collar, and put on some flesh over the adams-apple, and quit getting his neck shaved clear around, and began making abstract speeches, (written by somebody else because he was so busy) on “EFFICIENCY” before Ad-Men’s Clubs and Civic Bodies, until at last he stood Big Favorite wherever talk is talked.

Today Edward Ewart Galloway, Efficiency Engineer, sits in his own luxurious suite of solid mahog in New York, surrounded on every side by Brains to which he adds Guts and clears 85 percent net on the combination.

Every little while he gets an emergency call from some big industrial patient who pays him a steel magnate’s salary to come out to their plant and sit around smoking dollar cigars and twisting his moustache and looking wonderfully wise until such time as he can quietly find out what their own Sales Manager’s plans are for the coming season, and then in a Confidential Report to the Board, recommend them as his own good, original, incomparable stuff.

And the moral of it all is this: If you would rise in the Boss’s estimation and in salary, tell him occasionally that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s the only compliment he’ll stand for.

HOT SKETCH NO. 9

THE ROAD RAT WHO GAVE UP HOME COMFORTS

THE Whiffles did not exactly dwell on any Estate sweeping the green hills. They lived, moved and had their boiled cabbage in one of those sedentary little dumps that get their air through the keyhole in winter and smell like a Subway Local on a wet day.

The Whiffles had a son by the name of Ezekiel. On top of it he wore a readymade tie with a corset-stay on the back to keep it from looking human.

Ezekiel’s father had jute whiskers that blossomed from the chin out. He used to sit in the kitchen in his stocking-feet making nothing out of a piece of old wire. This hasn’t anything to do with the story, so we are tabulating it before the action begins.

It was Ezekiel’s daily custom to drop in at the Kelly House to find out if the Four Twenty was on time and thereby live more abundantly.

On this particular day, while Ezekiel was discussing the momentous issue with the diligently idle crowd of local Chair Polishers, he got acquainted with a Travelling Salesman from Whopps Corners, Ind., who always registered from New York City and wore a golden-pheasant vest.

Ezekiel had been reading about the Opportunities that were standing around on the corners of every big city getting bowlegged waiting for competent men to come and get them. So he asked the New York Salesman from Whopps Corners how about it.

The Salesman was modest and retiring, in keeping with the traditions of his profession, and it was therefore under considerable reluctance that he admitted to Ezekiel, with rather long easy puffs of the hessian, that as for himself he was only fetching down about a thousand dollars a month salary, plus a reasonable monthly unearned increment from his Expense Account. In spite of his shyness he seemed to give off the general impression that the Selling Game was one rosy-cheeked cinch.

Ezekiel thereupon decided that of all the fine arts, Salesmanship appeared to offer opportunities of the most scopeful circumference for becoming a millionaire in one reel.

So he went home and changed his socks in a devil-may-care fashion, and started for Chicago that same night, determined to land a job with some big House that travelled snappy men and did not grieve about Expense Accounts.

He was shrewd enough before leaving home to re-inforce his proposition with several strong To-Whom-It-May-Concerns from men of high standing in the community. One was from the Mayor of Squirrel Cove and another was executed by the Proprietor of the Crescent Hand Laundry who up and spoke in no uncertain tone respecting the high esteem in which our fellow townsman, Ezekiel Whiffle, was held by one and all.

* * * * *

Here let it be set down truthfully, with malice toward none, that Ezekiel Whiffle was no speckled yobbish when it came to doing the thing he packed off to do. He had a life-long record of accomplishment as clean as a willow whistle from the day he set out as a youth to shingle the silo, down to the last leg of the last stove he set up at the Hardware Store before his departure.

Thus it did not take Ezekiel one thousand years to land a job in Chicago, although the parking facilities for men less energetic were very tempting in the City of Basement Restaurants.

Within one week of his first lap round the Loop, Ezekiel had secured a comfortable berth as County Hurdler for a large Manufacturing Concern that was struggling to make both ends meet on 142 percent net profit after paying State and Federal squeeze.

Ezekiel’s very earnestness impressed the Boss, even if his Letters of Recommendation did not cause any wild demonstration around the Works. His lack of experience gave him a fresh point of view. He was quite free from the customary we-never-did-it-that-way advice to men who had been running their own business successfully for twenty years.

When the matter of salary was mentioned, Ezekiel had to remove his ear-muffs to be sure he heard the figure correctly. But he decided to go to it anyway and prove that he was worth more than the sixty dollars a month.

During the following fortnight Ezekiel overalled it in the various departments of the big Works getting grease on his face and gathering a rustic headful of practical information which resolved itself finally into a beautifully webbed mass that made the last estate of the poor goop worse than the first.

Zeekie was assigned by the Sales Manager to Luke’s Rock, Iowa, for the initial sales bombardment. The Sales Manager, with his well-set little New England head, had of course never been there himself, just as he had never been any place else, but he talked as though he had been making the dorp for years, and assured Ezekiel that there were wonderful possibilities at Luke’s Rock and said he would be greviously disappointed if Zeke did not pull out of there with fourteen carloads scored up in his Order Book.

“We are expecting big things of you,” he said.

“That’s more than I am expecting of you,” replied Zeke. But he replied it strictly to himself.

Then the S. M. gave Zeke one of those Boston handshakes and a modest bunch of Expense Money and told him to track.

* * * * *

Let us now be seated while we study Human Nature a little, and see if it is not a fact that when you hand a good Job and a bunch of Expense Money to a beadle who has never had either, you are liable to put a crimp in his psychology and enlarge his ego until he can’t find anything to fit it.

Take for illusample: When Ezekiel went from the Office to the Railway Station to catch his train, he felt so goshdanged good that he could have punched a hole through a limousine window for sheer ebullience of spirit.

But when he found that his train was late, he went up to the ticket window and told Mr. Vanderbilt just what he thought of the whole ratty System. And he told it so that everybody around the room could hear it and marvel at his courage and knowledge of railroading. He spoke as in behalf of an injured constituency.

When he boarded his train and got the hang of things, he commanded the porter to raise a window here and lower a shade there, and he ignored the cuspidor entirely every time he took a chew.

When he arrived at his metropolitan destination he gave the owner of the yellow Bus a beautiful bawl for not helping him with his little belly-leather suit-case, and on the way up to the hotel he complained to his fellow passengers about the rickety old boat, and wondered why there were no taxicabs in the dump.

When he was assigned to his room at the Luke’s Rock Hotel he kicked like a trapped rabbit because it was a walk-up. And when he saw the room he threw up both good old farm-knotted hands and said it wouldn’t do a-tall. They gave him another room and he went over and felt the bed and said the mattress was about as soft and responsive as the Town Scales.

When he came down for breakfast next morning and the Proprietor with his little strive-to-please face asked him how he had slept, he growled back “Rotten!” and lumbered into the dining room.

When the food came on, he complained that the butter was rancid, the rolls were doughy, the coffee was like turpentine, the eggs were boiled 3-3/4 minutes instead of 3-5/8 minutes as ordered, and the service was fierce.

A silent, contended-looking man sat opposite Ezekiel. He thanked the waitress with the thin Face and receding Future every time she brought him anything, and he seemed to relish the little meal as much as anybody could with a 72-centimetre dub sitting opposite.

Finally Ezekiel addressed the silent man. “This Road Life is certainly fierce, ain’t it?”, he said, pushing back his plate and yanking his napkin from under his red chin.

“It is,” replied the Man. “But it wouldn’t be, if four-flushers like you would keep off it.” Zeek stared, with jaws ajar.

“You are just an ordinary single-cylinder rum,” went on the stranger, “that never knew anything better than a corn-husk mattress and large beans soaked in hot water, until you got a job on the Road. Some day you may learn that the man who has travelled most, kicks least, and that the quickest way to tell a cheap staller is to see how he adapts himself to Road conditions.”

And with this caustic valedictory, the speaker got up from the table and left the room. Ezekiel, flushed and fast foundering, intended to get up too, and tell the fellow what he thought of him, but decided to keep his seat when he saw about nine feet of man arise from the table.

* * * * *

Now Ezekiel Whiffle might have sieved through something of benefit from this experience had he been given time for reflection. But he had to turn his thought to selling those 14 carloads that his Sales Manager had told him were crouching for a chance to spring into his brand new Order Book.

Besides, he was in no position to get a close-up on himself while he still had a Roll and represented the largest factory of its kind in the country.

Thus when he went to see the Trade his ego again got in the way and he couldn’t see that in this grand, free game of Commerce, it is the Buyer who has the right of Free Speech while the Seller must temporize and simulate. At least the Seller must temp and sim up to the time the Order is signed.

He can then go around the corner, if he wants to, and put his thumb to his nose or call the Buyer anything he can think up that doesn’t carry too far along the etheric waves. But to indulge any such feeling before one is off and premises is to invite probable loss of Sale and possible kick in neck.

But Zeekie, the poor smelt, got it all twisted and thought it was war-time and that Buyers were going to come up and kiss him when he arrived and ask him how all the folks were, and carry his suit-case for him, just because he had something to sell.

When they didn’t do it, but on the contrary, went right on reading and signing letters and transacting routine office business all the time he was talking to them, as Buyers in normal seasons enjoy doing, Zeekie felt that his dignity was being shot at from ambush, and so he began telling his Prospects different things that they could do if they didn’t want to buy his celebrated goods.

While no physical harm befell Ezekiel during these clashes, no orders befell him either, and after working the whole surrounding county and netting nothing but a large ostrich egg, he sat down at the wabbly hotel writing-desk on Saturday night and sent the Sales Manager a Report about those fourteen carloads that made that astute little Baked Bean shoot to the scantlings when he read it on Monday morning.

It took the Bostonian about one full minute after he struck terra cotta again to realize that Ezekiel was down with a violent case of Sales-manic Inflation that could be cured only by the knife. So he promptly cut off Zeke’s job and wired him to take the Fifteen Dollars he still had of Dear Firm’s expense money and paddle back to the Old Home Hamlet with it.

Now we come on with the anti-climax, the fall of the action, and the close, thus preserving the dramatic unities and giving our readers that sense of relief which a concluding announcement of ours always brings.

When the Hotel Proprietor received the fateful telegram Monday noon and delivered it personally to Ezekiel Whiffle at the breakfast table, the large bucolic appetite which Ezekiel had been vigorously feeding, suddenly and unceremoniously departed, leaving a whole shredded wheat biscuit midway between his incisors and the outside of his face. In fact he entirely forgot it was there until he came to, several minutes or aeons afterward, and tried to pass a glass of water along the parched pathway of his oesophagus.

On the thirty-seventh reading of the Farewell Proclamation, Ezekiel pulled himself together sufficiently to get up from the table and go out and announce to the Proprietor he was leaving for Chicago on the 3:37. The painstaking little Prop observed for the first time a human note in Zeke’s way of putting things.

He suggested that there was a fast train an hour later that carried all Pullmans and got in four hours sooner, if Zeke cared to drive over to the B. Q. & X. junction a mile away. Zeke thanked him (1st thank recorded) and said he had just as soon take the Day Coach Train as he was only going to be on it a day and a night.

Zeke went upstairs to pack his things and had a feeling that his room somehow was much larger and more comfortable than he had thought it was, and he sort of hated to give it up.

When the yellow bus came alongside for the 3:37 and the driver attempted to toss Zeke’s suit-case up on the roof, Zeke took it away from him and said he guessed he’d walk to the station and get the fresh air. The driver asked if he might take the suit-case anyway; but Zeke feared a nickle tip might be expected and he pulled it back and started off for the Station.

The Bus rumbled past Zeke on the way and Zeke thought they had painted it or something. Fifteen minutes later when he was still a half mile from the Station with but 10 minutes to spare, and had just shifted his baggage from hand to hand for the eleventh time, and was sweating like a Madras coolie, he got to thinking what a nice accomodation a Bus was anyway for a little jerkwater like Luke’s Rock, and wished he had hopped it at the Hotel.

The 3:37 was one hour and fifty-nine minutes late but Zeke didn’t have anything to attend to at destination that he couldn’t do just as well sitting here; so he continued his reflections about Life in general and didn’t grouse even to himself.

After riding a hundred and fifty years on the Day Coach, Zeke finally reached Chicago with a stiff neck and swollen underpinning but meek as a mujik. As he was hobbling out of the busy Railway Station a Red Cap passed him toting two big suit-cases. They had a million labels pasted all over them and as Zeke humped along behind, he began to inspect the curiosity.

He was reading “Bombay,” “Constantinople,” “Cairo” and a lot of other names that he had never heard before, and was wondering what State they were in, when he heard a voice just behind him call to the Red Cap: “Here, Boy, put them on this taxi.”

Ezekiel looked up and beheld the Big Silent Man—the man who had imparted the much needed but disregarded advice on the occasion of Zeke’s first meal at somebody else’s expense.

“Blackstone Hotel,” said the Big Man as he handed the Red Cap a quarter and stepped into the Taxi.

That night in a wee inside room on the fourth floor of the Lake Smell Dollar Up sat Ezekiel Whiffle trying to read the Help Wanted columns by the dim light that spluttered from a broken gas fixture over the narrow spring-tooth bed.

He was a sadder but a wiser Ambassador of Commerce.

HOT SKETCH NO. 10

THE MAN WHO ORGANIZED MANUFACTURERS

A TIRED Business Man sat at his busy desk cleaning his nails with his paper-knife and lamenting in his tired-businessman’s heart the lack of organization among manufacturers.

The name of this particular t. b. Man was Willyums and he was well-to-do and had a separate pair of suspenders for each pair of trousers.

“Just look at the situation,” sighed our fervent plugger for united action. “Here we manufacturers are, all knifing one another like a squirming bunch of inch-browed dagoes, when we ought to be solidly organized and working as a single unit against the iniquitous principle of labor organization.”

At this point in Willyums’ little round soliloquy the Office Beetle crawled in and handed him his morning’s mail.

Willyums picked up the letter and read it carefully. It was from a friendly Compett who complained bitterly about the Government’s unfair discrimination, and he asked Willyums to offer a suggestion how to head off all such pernicious activity.

This gave Willyums a great wide opportunity to ventilate his views on the crying necessity for cooperative action among manufacturers.

He dictated a letter that was all muscle and fibre. In it he urged the importance of all manufacturers organizing for their mutual protection. He stated that only through unselfishness on the part of Each, could the good of All be served; and original things like that.

Willyums then drafted another snorter to send out to such other manufacturers as he was on speaking terms with, and he pleaded with them to put their shoulders to the wheel and make every sacrifice for the furtherance of the Cause.

He said that any man who would not give up his time whole-heartedly to the work was a stumbling-block in the march of Progress, and he coined other metaphors and epigrammatic phrases that made his letter sizzle and spit like a war-whooper at the Big Grove.

When the “copy” was typewritten and delivered back to Willyums to read and enjoy, he scanned it hurriedly a few dozen times and then handed it to his Advertising-Manager and told that groove-dweller to cut out all the personal pronouns so the Trade wouldn’t think it came from J. Ham Lewis and then gallop the letter off to all the names on the list.

The responses that fluttered back were very encouraging. Everybody seemed strong for organizing at once, and several letters indicated subdued excitement.

A number of leading manufacturers soon got together and perfected a temporary organization and selected a name for the new Association that read like a serial story.

Business matters of a pressing nature prevented Willyums from attending the first meeting, but he wrote a strong letter of endorsement and it was read at the morning session and was much enjoyed by All Those Present as well as himself.

At this Conference it was decided to hold a big meeting of the whole Trade and get things going like a busy shipyard, and the place and date were fixed well in advance so that nobody could stall out.

Willyums wrote the Secretary back another shoulder-to-the-wheel letter and said he would be there positivoli. But when the time slid up for him to set sail, he and his wife had a Breathitt County difference of opinion which threatened to end in Woodlawn Cemetery. It started about her always leaving the icebox door open, and finished up with a pungent polemic on his sensitiveness and all-round worthlessness as a marital leaning post.

Willyums naturally wanted to stick in the ring till the finish, so he was obliged to wire The Boys that he couldn’t be at the meeting and to go ahead without him.

The Meeting proved to be a Great Success and a date was fixed for the First Annual Convention which was to be held at Wagon Springs, Va., and all members were notified to be on hand and to bring their wives and colorless daughters along to enjoy the Entertainment Features and drink of the health-giving waters generously provided by the Hotel Management, with the slight assistance of Nature, at five cents per glass or one cent per paper cup.

Willyums invited Comrade Wife to accompany him and helped her to get her hat-box through the door and shut the cover of her yawning trunk and pack into his own little tin-trimmed steamer all the things she had forgotten to put in her travelling bungalow.

When Willyums arrived at Wagon Springs the Hotel people gave him the customary welcome of The Hotel Successful which consists in telling the train-tuckered visitor that they have no record of any reservation for him and that he will have to sleep on the Town Pump or up in the pigeons’ quarters.

Willyums smoothed out the bulge in his shirt-bosom and told the Emperor back of the desk that he was there to attend The Convention, and as soon as he said this, he lost the two good sleeping-chances referred to up-page.

This made him as sore as a blistered heel and he went straight to the Twelfth Assistant Manager and told him (the 12th Ass’t Manager) that if it had not been for him (Willyums), there would be no Convention at all, and that he (12th Ass’t Manager) would not be running full-up in his (Mgr’s) old Hotel, and that if he (M) did not at once provide him (W) with suitable accomodations, there was going to be a small but efficient funeral around there.

Willyums got the accomodations all right, including a washstand and neat little ash tray to put his ashes in; but it was so late when he and Mrs. Willyums hit the hessian that they did not open up until 10 o’clock next morning, and then he had to go and dig up the lost luggage so that Madame could drape her matronly Fig. in a new child’s dress.

As a consequence Willyums did not get to the opening session of the Convention but he pumped palms with a number of delegates and said he would see them surely at the afternoon session.

The afternoon session was scheduled for 2 o’clock, and so the delegates got there promptly at 3. Willyums was somewhere about the 3rd hole when the meeting was called to order because Mrs. Willyums was just a cub at golf and insisted on doing the 18 no matter what happened. They sweated back to the hotel along about sundown, barely on speaking terms because he had told her that the woman did not live who would not cheat at golf.

The next morning Willyums announced solemnly to his unselfish helpmeet that he was going to attend the remaining sessions of the Convention or bust. Whereupon Mrs. Willyums let loose a torrent of real tears and told him what a shrimp he was to bring her along and then keep her cooped up in a little ingrowing room when they might both be riding in the mountains and getting some fresh air.

Willyums was a highly sensitized man and could not endure lachrymal leaks, and it did not take him long to give in. In fact he caved in, and accompanied his considerate little wife on horseback, and they had a very nice time and both agreed that the afternoon would positively be his to spend at the closing session of the Convention.

When they returned to the Hotel Willyums learned that the Convention had disposed of all pending matters at the preceding session and had decided to adjourn _sine die_ and give the last afternoon over to Unalloyed Pleasure.

Willyums met several delegates coming out of the Convention Hall and they told him they did not know what they should have done without his generous cooperation, and thanked him for the Great Assistance he had been to them all since the very beginning.

_Lesson for Today:_ A Trade Organization never grew strong
on Absent Treatment.

HOT SKETCH NO. 11

THE PERPETUAL PLANNER

FLOPPINGHAM WATERDELL sat in his office, feet erect, smoking his morning sisal.

And nursing along his habitual grouch against Dear Firm.

Six months before, Floppingham Waterdell had been stricken with the honor of Branch Manager.

It was the biggest job he had ever managed to throw in all his long speckled career, but for some foolish reason Dear Firm thought they had hold of a Whale when they fished him out of the deep blue sea of Job Searchers.

“The utter planlessness of their work,” sighed Floppingham, re-crossing his unexercised legs and taking another long, legumenous puff at the root of all evil.

“They send me here to take charge of an office that has heretofore been conducted absolutely without system, and then they expect me to go out and do business without telling me where they want me to go, or how they expect me to go about it. They scuttle my plans and they don’t offer any themselves. All they say is, ‘Go get the business.’”

“All work should be planned beforehand,” continued Floppingham, reflectively. “No business man should attempt to do business until he knows his territory thoroughly and the character of his Prospects—even down to their peculiarities and hobbies, thus eliminating lost motion in the Approach, and simplifying the road of ingress.”

From the foregoing irridescent little exerpt from Floppingham Waterdell’s daily conferences with himself over the deficiencies of his Firm, the reader has come to the conclusion, or not, as the case may be, that Floppingham was himself a rhinoceros of no small heft when it came to Business Efficiency.

And indeed Flop was.

Every file in the office, every colored thumbtack on the map, every drawer of his desk, every card-index, chart, letter and cuspidor sang of The Office Efficient.

And all accomplished within six short, shrimpy months!

For examp: When Floppingham took charge of the dump, you couldn’t find a letter in the files without looking for it. Three months later you didn’t have to go to the files at all when you wanted to look at a letter. You would go to a Card Index where you found all the meaty paragraphs of the letter arranged on a card alphabetically, chronologically and hypodermically, including the writer’s telephone number and all such other thrilling news as appears at the apex of the average letterhead.

As a check against error, you then would get out the original letter from the regular files and compare the card with the letter, or the letter with the card, or vice versa, and the trick was done! Positively no plush curtains or false bottoms to deceive you!

It took one girl only four months to get this system in shape so she could take off the skid-chains.

Before Floppingham assumed charge, nobody around the office even knew how many steps a thirsty bookkeeper had to take to make the water-tank at the opposite side of the room and get back to the revolving perch. Nor did anybody know the amount of time that was consumed per step in such a wild orgy.

But Floppingham, through his original system of Step Reduction, figured out that if the bookkeeper would lengthen his stride to the Thirst Muffler, he would thereby reduce the number of steps; or, in other well selected words, reduce the time consumed in wasting Dear Firm’s time drinking water.

Thus if ten steps were saved through Step Standardization, and each step consumed one second, that would mean a net saving of ten seconds per trip to the Trough. Granted that six trips per day were made during the winter months, and six hundred during the Dog Season, the result would be a grand total of umpty-ump hours per year per clerk, or a net saving of ifty-ift dollars per year to the Business.

And just to show you to what a fine point the reasoning of the Efficiency Engineer can be spun out without snapping, we will add that Floppingham always took into consideration the length of an applicant’s legs when hiring a clerk.

These were but a couple of Floppingham’s efficiency installations. He had a million of them. They ranged all the way from Sales Planning to counting the number of puffs to a hemp panatella. He wore out the seat of his trouserial furniture figuring them out.

One day Dear Firm sent him a letter swathed in purple satire, suggesting that Efficiency was a means, not an end, and that if he felt that his Branch could do a little Business once in a while without greatly impairing its uselessness, they would send him a bright young man with a plaid vest to help him make sales.

Whereupon Floppingham Waterdell adjusted his glasses, took up his efficient pen that had pulled him through many a stall, and wrote out plans and specifications covering the kind and quality of man he desired.

It is possible that the talent and virtues and experience of the Human Race, taken as a whole, might have perhaps been able to squeeze up to Floppingham’s requirements as set forth by Flop under numerous heads and sub-heads designated as (a) (b) (c) and so forth—the kind, you know, that many Government employes and other bluffologists revel in.

When Dear Firm received from Floppingham this last brilliant contribution to the records of Commercial Pish, they winked one eye clear to the roots and then dictated the following Appreciation:

“We don’t know just when it happened, nor just how it happened, but the Business World today is infested with a new stripe of grafter—the Efficiency Eel, to which School you seem to have a Rhodes Scholarship.

“Efficiency Eels are Word Wizards and Figure Fixers of a very clever order, and we poor uneducated kanoops of the workaday-and-night world have been caught by the swing of their phrases and the flare of their ‘facts.’

“Not a yap of them ever did a day’s work since he left college, and couldn’t get out and sell a bill of postage stamps at 50 and 5. Instead of planning for business, they make a business of planning. They are always getting ready, but they never start. They are piffling pollywogs on the plane of the Practical, but past grand masters in the philosophy of Bunk.

“The reason they keep planning and organizing and systemizing all the time is because they know they are nix glox on Performance. And plans without performance are like teeth without jaws.

“Show us the gunk that is always laying the blame for his own failure to lack of efficiency and system in his employer’s business, and we’ll show you a gunk who is stalling for fair.

“For six months, come Yom Kippur, you have been ‘planning’ to bag a little business, and if we kept you there for six years, or six hundred years, you would still be planning. You are a planner and not a worker. You can MAKE plans all right, but you could not EXECUTE one of them if it laid its head on the block and handed you the axe.

“It isn’t your fault, Mr. Stall, that we have been slow to get your curves. We are just like hundreds of other firms—just plain, ordinary yappoos who would rather hire an outside man at $20,000 a year to do nothing but plan, than give half the salary to an inside man and have him perform. But now that we are ON, would you mind considering yourself submarined and greatly oblige etc.”

_Lesson for Today:_ One bill of goods sold is worth more
than a dozen planned.

HOT SKETCH NO. 12

THE TWIN-SIX PHILANTHROPIST

A POVERTY-PANNED mill owner who had only been able to finger in a bare ten million after twenty gruelling years of grimy grind at Board Meetings and Stock-holders’ Seances, sat wearily at his flat-topped Mahogany and heaved a long abdominal sigh at the hellward tendency of the children of today.

“It’s all due to the Pernicious Activity of these agitators,” he said, wiping away a great big humanitarian tear. “All that I am today I owe to the hardships I suffered when a child.”

Here he turned on a few more big salty boys and then continued; “Poverty is a blessing and an educator, and yet these here agitators come along and want to take out of my mill the lucky children that are having a chance through my bounty to become worthy citizens of this great, glorious Republic of ours.”

He was just on the verge of adding a few trembling mushmellows about the stars and stripes waving in the free, pure air of America when his emotion got a hackenschmidt stranglehold on his large oily thorax, and he couldn’t splutter it across.

When he had recovered his composure and wiped the sweat-beads from his nice thick neck, he got to thinking some more of all he had done for the town by giving employment to its skinny-legged children, and putting more money in circulation, and all that sort of fly-smacked mediaeval economics, and he choked up again at the thought of how little his beneficence had been appreciated.

In his great paternal heart he knew that his motive in doing all this unselfish thing for the thin-wristed tots of the town was as pure as the lotos flower, and that there was no low-lying thought of the good old coin he was pulling down on the investment.

In fact he was so sure of it that when he chanced one day to notice a wee ripple on the sweet still sea of Graft in the shape of a parboiled attempt to increase the children’s wages from One Penny to Two Pennies, he was about as indifferent as a gunless man in a tiger’s lair.

Many other little things went to show the philanthropic purpose of King Paunch’s acts. He had, for instance, a noonday feed served to the child workers which enabled them to romp joyfully back to the looms twenty minutes sooner each day, and a little later he again got busy with his short pencil and long head and figured out how he could cut off a certain yard space for a playground without cutting off the profits.

He stood wide-legged and willing at all times to prove to anybody that the children were better off in his mill working ten hours a day than they would be in their homes, and that when it came to Loving Care and Attention the laughing loom had any Day Nursery in the land walloped to a wobble.

There was no opportunity, he contended, for the youngsters to acquire vicious habits, except a lint-cough, and by keeping them standing all day catching threads to the rhythm of the loom-buzz, they would not run up against wicked temptation to Walk the Streets.

Every time he would get through telling about his charitable works, he would feel for his halo to see that it was on straight.

In certain moments of mental liberality he would concede that his mill did not include quite all the conveniences and comforts of Heaven, but generally speaking, it was about the most constructive hangout, from a physical, mental and moral standpoint, that you could find south of the Pearline Gates.

There was a touch of pathos in the sight of this willing martyr to the cause of Progress and Purity getting all sweatted up arguing his side of the case against those fanatics who were obsessed with the crazy notion that the place for little children was in school.

Searching through history he found that all the other great and good benefactors of the Race had always run up against the cross or the hemlock in time, and so whenever he was not perorating with fist-pounding positives, he was lying back sad-eyed and resigned, trying to acquire a forgive-them-for-they-know-not-what-they-do look, and breathing forgiveness heavily through every pore.

In time—and now we are coming to the weep part of our throbbing tale—Colonel Razorback’s friends began to notice that he was throttling down physically to the point where the only thing that could save him from losing his appetite between meals was to send him to Carlsbad.

Constant worriment over the passage of some Law in the selfish interest of Public Good by which he might have to give up his 500 precious child charges to the ruthless and demoralizing influence of home and school, reacted upon his liver and it began to reach out and kick him in the spine when he wasn’t looking.

There was not the least sign anywhere around the organic or functional premises to indicate that his condition was aggravated by the thought that he might have to employ grown-ups at slightly stretched wages, and we have therefore no right to diagnose any man’s case afar off.

We shall only say in passing, and without any intimate relevancy to our story whatever, that Colonel Hogshead was pained to the very quick-sand to have to leave his young daughter and his little cowlick-headed son to the tender mercies of a private tutor, a governess, three freckled servants, and their mother, but he managed to bear up under it, and sail away to Carlsbad.

Thus, after issuing Strict Instructions that his own precious tendrils should breathe no second-hand air, nor go out in the heat of the day, nor study too hard, nor exercise when they were the least bit tired, nor get less than 10 hours sleep, nor eat anything not raised under glass, he tore himself away, and, in due time, was lying peaceful and fat in his deck-chair, rugged in snugly and comfy, sleeping the sleep of the Righteous, and dreaming contentedly of all that he was today—all that the blessed privilege of early poverty had made him.

_Lesson for Today:_ Poverty and toil are blessings which we
protect our own from enjoying.

HOT SKETCH NO. 13

THE YOB WHO LET BUSINESS SLIDE

SLOBBINGS knew that motor cars had four wheels and were owned by people who could not afford them.

Slobbings’ wife was equally well up on the subject. She was once acquainted with some folks who had one of those graceful maroon tonneaus with the little back door like a Hicksville hotel bus, and she used to watch them take up the floor and dive down into the basement to fix the machinery every few miles when something went wrong.

Slobbings knew only too well that the day was coming when his wife would be asking him why it was that they were always hoofing it while their neighbors were jerking past in neat little Fords.