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.
He himself was razor-keen to sit back of a steering wheel of his own
and toot a big hebrew horn at jumping pedestrians, but he decided to
lay low and let her spring the inevitable question first so that when
they bought a car he could forever after blame her for everything that
happened this side of Mars.
The issue came up as expected when the Spring flowers began to hatch,
and the smell of new mown gasolene was in the air.
Thus it came to pass that Slobbings and his wife sallied forth one
sunny afternoon to feed the motor microbe.
They passed right by the Ford agency but couldn’t see it because
they hadn’t a telescope. Nothing less than a Twin Eight for them!
They spent about three hours of lumpy stalling around the Automobile
Shopping District pretending they knew what The Man was talking about,
and concentrating on the relative merits of wind shields and ignoring
little unimportant details like magnetos, carburetors, engines, etc.
But after getting familiar with prices, they began to filter down into
the Flivver class along about evening-fall and were ready to stop
feeling upholstery and get down to cases.
Their decision finally perched upon a snappy, unimpeachable, luxurious
top-quality performer which was priced at three figures, the tallest
one of the three being under nine, although not more than two or three
flights under.
They owned the car all of one day when the matrimonial bliss in which
they had been soaring was brought down, and both occupants barely
escaped with their lives.
It happened this way: Slobbings had been under the droll hallucination
that he could drive the thing, and so he waved off the young man from
the Agency who had volunteered to show him how to stay on a fairly
wide road, and started to cut loose with the levers himself, with his
Helpmeet at his right.
When the excitement subsided he took his wife into the house and stood
her in a corner and made her solemnly swear that in future whenever one
was driving, the other was never to cut in with criticism, contumely or
contemptuous comment at critical junctures, but was to either sit tight
or get out and pedal.
The next morning while Slobbings was at his office trying to get his
mind on work, his wife sneaked over and got the demonstrator to throw
away his chew and put on his coat and give her a lesson in driving the
little pelican.
That night when she and Slobbings started out, it was she who insisted
upon taking the wheel, and this gave Slobbings the pleasure of sitting
on the thin edge of Uncertainty and grabbing the Emergency Brake every
time another car could be discerned with the naked eye coming toward
them.
Whenever she tooted the horn to signal their nervous approach, he
would hand her the not-so-loud-dearie caution, hissing said caution
between such teeth as he had not already ground off during previous
hair-breadth escapes.
If he happened to be the one driving, and stuck out his wing to let
the Traffic know he was going to turn a corner in due season provided
he did not stall his engine, his wife would tell him that it was not
customary nor necessary to injure one’s spine hanging so far over
the side of the car. In devious other ways she vented her unstrung
condition and frequently referred warmly to his all-round hopelessness
as a level-headed driver.
There was a demoniacal something that came and sat between them every
time they got into that car. The Dove of Peace never flew within five
thousand miles of the tail light at any stage of the tragedy.
Each got the idea that the other felt there was nothing left around
the car to be learned, and this naturally led to fierce engagements in
which hand grenades were used freely on both sides.
Every time he told her that she shifted her gears like a steam riveter,
she would spring back and tell him between her teeth that he couldn’t
drive a nail, and then she’d follow through with a mighty beanbammer
about his family not being very bright anyway, and no wonder he
couldn’t get anything past the porphery.
She accused him of throwing out his chest when he ought to be throwing
out his clutch, and he retaliated by charging her with imagining she
was Barney Oldfield because she could cut around a moving van without
losing more than one mud guard.
In their refreshing evening drives together, the one who would first
discover that the Emergency Brake was still on, would get right out
on the hood and crow and flap like a Hoosier cock in a congested
corn-crib, making the other naturally as pleased as a pup with its tail
in the door.
History does not recall that Slobbings and his merry mate ever came to
a corner that he didn’t want to turn one way and she another, nor that
both ever desired the Top up or down at the same time.
One day about six months after the Home Breaker had been purchased,
Slobbings met with a serious business throw-back. No one was to blame
but himself. Motoring had interfered with his Business and he had cut
his Office from his visiting list.
Among other things there was an over-ripe note at the bank and he
was obliged to produce the necessary piastres within twelve hours.
So without slipping a syllable to his wife he up and sold the car,
receiving therefor an amount so far below original cost that it made
him dizzy to look down at it.
A few days later he broke the news to the Gentle One, and, after the
lachrymal flood-gates had been opened and closed again in the usual
way, she braced up and said it was all right and they would have to Be
Brave.
A hell-hot evening in the following August found Slobbings and his wife
taking a nice trolley ride out into the country for a sniff of fresh
ozone.
They were sitting side by side, looking over the fields of waving
wollypus, and he had his arm around her.
Both were silent. They were thinking of the same thing.
“Well anyway,” she said at last, “we _did_ have good times with the
little car while it lasted, didn’t we dear?”
“Yes, love,” he replied softly, “those were the happy days.”
_Lesson for Today:_ We don’t know what we’ve got until we
haven’t got it any longer.
HOT SKETCH NO. 14
THE WOULD-BE SALES PROMOTER
ONE day a successful Manufacturer who had become strongly addicted to
Efficiency Literature after making his pile, sat down and reasoned with
himself thus:
“Something is wrong with my business. The Sales Increase for last year
was only 120 percent. It should have been 850 percent. The fault lies
with my Sales Manager.”
“True, he is a good slob, but he is not good enough. My Salesmen all
like him and plug hard on his account, to say nothing of their own; but
they don’t plug hard enough.”
“What I need is a Sales Chief who is not stocked up with the dry-bones
of Salesmanship—someone who comes from the outside and brings a fresh,
crisp point of view—someone who knows nothing at all about the Selling
Game. That’s the stunt these days! My present man is in a rut. Raus!”
The morning following this sparkling synthesis, Comrade President
called in the pre-damned S. M. and tied a campbell soup can to his
Promising Career and sent him clattering up Main Street.
Then he grabbed a note-pad, scribbled off a terse Classified Ad,
pressed a button on the waistline of his desk, and told the Office
Poodle to get it into the morning papers and quit spitting on the
radiator.
* * * * *
On a high stool in the Bookkeeping Department of a certain Plumbers
Supply House sat an upright and painstaking young gentleman who wrote
an excellent hand, never erred in his posting, and fainted when anybody
turned the ledger pages from the bottom instead of the top.
But of late years he had contracted a serious case of
correspondence-schoolitis and within him was stirring strong the
ambition to Become An Executive And Earn Fifty Thousand A Year.
He was firmly convinced that the only difference between the man
shoveling coal and the man shoveling coin was a difference in Earning
Power, as told graphically in the pictures; and so whenever the Boss
wasn’t looking, he would pull out his book and study up on how to
increase his Earning Power.
On this particular morning this particular young gentleman had been
casually perusing the newspaper for a few hours prior to the Boss’s
arrival, and he had almost finished the twenty-eighth page when his eye
leeched upon the advertisement of our friend the Efficiency President
about whom we were chatting pleasantly before we went off on this spur.
“I feel the fingers of Fate upon my spine,” said the young gentleman
osteopathically, as he clipped the Ad from the paper and slipped it
into the upper berth of his double-breasted white waistcoat.
When the noon hour struck, it took him just two and one-quarter minutes
to slide down the scaffolding of the high stool, grab his little
cardboard derby, and jump a passing trolley in quest of the job.
But when he arrived at the factory, his Nerve suddenly up and left for
parts unknown. With trembling ears, and muscles of the map twitching
like a mare’s flank shivering off flies, he opened the office door. He
didn’t burst it open wildly like a cartman with a delivery receipt for
you to sign, or any important personage like that. He opened it just
wide enough to squeeze through and scrape the buttons all off his coat.
The man in charge knew of course what this flickering taper had oozed
in for. It was a cinch he wasn’t some Kentucky customer calling to
raise hell about the last shipment. Only a man looking for a job could
behave like a seidlitz powder and not arouse suspicion. So he ushered
him in to see the President.
Mister President, pushing back his whiskers for oratorical clearance,
delivered himself thus:
“Young Man,” he said, “have you any reason, either apparent or
hidden about the premises, for thinking that you know any more about
Salesmanship than a squirrel knows about Santa Claus?”
“No sir,” blurted the Dose of Salts, meaning to say “yes” and bluff it
out.
“Good!” broke in Uncle President. “You’ve got the very qualification
I’m looking for.
“And what name do you wag to?” queried Monsieur Le President, well
pleased with his exceptional perceptive faculty.
“Elliott Buc——” But Pres. cut him short. “Never mind the details,” he
said.
“And now Elliott,” he continued, throwing back an emphatic lapel and
hooking his presidential thumb into his vest pocket, “I am going to
make you my Sales Manager. You look and act as unlike a Sales Manager
as anything I’ve ever seen this side of Lapland and that’s why I think
you’ll do. I’m working on a new system. So get up off the floor there,
and say ‘thank you’—and GO TO IT!”
* * * * *
Elliott’s full and complete name may be itemized as follows: Elliott
Buckingham Tudor-Smith. But around the office they promptly re-capped
it under the appropriate and musical monicker of “Ellie.”
They also noted that from the instant Ellie landed the coveted job, his
knees and his neck began to stiffen like a steel bar, and there was
something in his manner that seemed to say: “The President should be
congratulated upon his good judgment.”
The whole overburdened Office Staff were stop-work observers of
everything that went on in the office from a giggly conversation among
the girls down to delivering a bottle of crystal spring water for the
ice-cooler, and of course they all saw and remembered how Ellie went
into the President’s office on all fours to apply for the job.
Hence when they now saw him swank past them full of superior swish and
driving his heels to the floor like a Grenadier Guard, they naturally
began to develop that warmth of fellowship toward him that one feels
for the cramps.
Had Elliott not been by profession a Bookkeeper, he would have made
a good Haberdasher. When it came to practical Salesmanship he had
about as much experience as a sponge diver. Hence he possessed many
essential qualifications of the modern blank-cartridge Sales Director,
as psychically discerned by the President at the outset.
While Elliott might be described as a traveled person, he was not what
you would exactly call a globe-trotter in the strict sense of said
term. He had on several occasions joined the Sunday Excursion to
Churubusco, Indiana, with the white duck panties and the blue serge
Double Breasted. Also he had been twice to Chicago; once during his
honeymoon, and once when he went there to get his teeth filled, and in
so doing made the local horseshoer sore on him for life.
We mention this irrelevancy merely to show that when it came to
skipping here and there over the cornbelt, and getting back to the Home
Town safe and sound and unrobbed, Elliott could hold his own with the
best of them.
Elliott possessed still another essential to successful latter-day
sales management. He was one rhinoceros on System. In less than three
months after he had set sail upon the hazardous sea of Sales Promotion,
he had everything on the premises mapped and charted and indexed and
cross-indexed and sub-indexed and super-indexed forty-seven different
ways.
Any ordinary question put to him about the Business or the Weather
would be followed by the pulling out of numerous little drawers and
card-indexes and files and charts and things until the Questioner had
forgotten what it was he asked about, or had gone on to other matters
or to sleep.
Elliott’s highest qualification for his job, however, lay in his
early-discovered ability to write a very superior quality of nagging
letter to the Salesmen under him. When it came to the Quibble & Nag
stuff, Elliott had every corn-fed Sales Manager in the land rolled up
like a carpet.
Having himself never sold a Bill of Goods in his tiny conventional
life, and being barely able to tell the Goods from a large knobby sack
of apples without first walking all around them and squinting at them
from different angles, he was insured at all times against writing the
Sales Force upon anything that might be of any importance whatever to
the Business.
For instance, when the Firm’s crack salesmanic shot of the Western
Territory was aching like an ingrowing toenail for some constructive
suggestion from Headquarters concerning a Big Deal he was trying
to put across, he would receive a three-page Satire from Ellie
criticizing him for scoring up 168 miles in his Expense Book when the
R. R. Guide showed plainly and Unmistakably that the actual distance
from point to point was only 167 miles.
And when some other Sales Wizard would send in a C/L Order from some
dotty dorp off in the scrub of Oblivion where The House had never
before sold a Lincoln Penny’s worth of their fully-guaranteed Stuff,
Ellie would promptly press Button No. 2 (gawd, how Eddie loved to press
those buttons!) and then dictate to the anaemic stenographer a couple
of pages of acid contumely, telling how surprised The Writer was that
an Order from a territory of such potential greatness should not have
called for ten carloads instead of one carload.
Ellie of course never hiked out on The Road himself and therefore never
knew whether a given Territory was potentially great or potentially
punk, nor whether one carload was a slashing big Order or a paltry
pee-wee, but he always had to write cheery stuff like yon foregoing
because this is the particular phobia of the desk-reared Sales Manager.
Ellie never believed in complimenting a Road Rat and running the risk
of impairing the gunk’s proper perspective of his work and maybe cause
him to slap in an extra bus-fare on the strength of it.
In short, Ellie’s skilful management naturally succeeded in putting The
Boys in such excellent spirits that every time they got a letter from
him they felt like shooting up a Home for Incurables.
But in due and good time it came to pass that all those Salesmen on
Elliott’s staff that were not buying clapboard homes on installment,
slapped in their resignations and politely told Ellie and His System to
go to hellenstaythere.
This, however, did not cause so much as a tropical ripple on the sea
of Serenity upon which Elliott Buckingham Tudor-Smith was gliding so
smoothly. As fast as one Salesman would up and kick off his breechin’,
Ellie would hire another, and each time he got a better man than the
man who quit. After a while he had as fine a bunch of Ribbon Clerks as
ever lined up against a soda fountain on a reckless Saturday afternoon.
* * * * *
But all things come to him who stoops over when the boot of Wrath draws
nigh. At the end of the Fiscal Year, which is the time of reckoning
and erasing and general all ’round fixing of fake entries, Comrade
President called Elliott into his private office, leaned back in his
executive Swivel, and relieved himself of the following ballad:
“Young man,” he said, feeling for his tonsils to see that they were on
straight, “I have just looked over the Sales Record for the year during
which you have been benching in the Sales Department, and I find that
Sales have fallen so shockingly low that they ought to be in a Rescue
Home.
“When I gave you that job I was following out a plan that has proven
successful in many cases as shown by magazine articles. I thought you
would make a good Sales Manager because you knew nothing about Selling,
just as the best organizers of Business Men’s Associations are
Kendallville Professors who know nothing about Business, and the best
writers of Efficiency Stuff are men who file their correspondence on a
hook, and the most dazzling Shop Management Talksters those who heave a
wheelbarrow over a fence and never see the gate.
“I now see that I was not only Dead Wrong but absolutely bughouse.
I might as well expect to get a good hair-cut by a piano-tuner or
boxing-lessons from a Tea Tenor, as to get a good Sales Manager out of
any man who gets off a train head-first and doesn’t know a Sample Case
from a schmeerkase.
“In twelve long, lanky months you haven’t yet got the lie of the 2nd
hole on the Selling Course, and I have a sneaky suspicion that you
wouldn’t get around the first Nine in ninety years.
“You couldn’t get a Salesman’s point of view if he stuck you in the leg
with it, and for the same reason you couldn’t see the Dealer’s slant
on things, nor the House’s policy if you trained a super-telescope on
them.
[Illustration: Proff O. U. Bojack (Bus. Doc.)]
“Besides all that, you have been so busy trying to think out some new
high-sounding title for your job, and writing brainless Briefs on
Salesmanship for the tired Trade Press, and attending so many noonday
foolishers called Business Luncheons, that you haven’t yet had time to
learn whether our Line of Goods is made to wear or to eat.
“Here and there in this worryful World of Business you will
occasionally find some old moss-chest who still holds that Salesmanship
means SELLING GOODS, and not Charts, Maps, Conferences and After Dinner
Oratory. I now see, after a brief but total eclipse of Horse Sense due
to too much reading and too little thinking, that I am one of those Old
Timers myself.
“I don’t blame _you_,” he went on, unmindful of a pair of quaking pants
before him, “for getting the Bilged Bean right at the crank-up, for you
have never shinned the rough spots of Salesmanship yourself, and you
haven’t got the imagination of a moving van.
“The fault is all mine,” he concluded, “but that’s a matter that
doesn’t cut any cantaloupe now. So get back to the High Stool and ply
your penmanship! I’ve decided to hire a Regular. Voetsak!”
HOT SKETCH NO. 15
THE YOUNG SATELLITES OF STALLVILLE
CLARENCE and Bud lived in the same dotty dorp and went to the same
little red-necked school.
Clarence was a studious piece of Rocquefort and scored 100 in
everything.
Bud’s monthly report looked like the stock quotations in a demoralized
market.
Whenever anything was pulled in the shape of Rough House, Bud was
usually the Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Clarence, on yon other hand, always conducted himself in an Exemplary
Manner and wore leggins.
There was a big manufacturing plant in the town and when the boys
finished school they naturally went to work there. Everybody did. The
whole force was born and raised within sound of the whistle.
The Export Manager had never been clear across the County Line. That’s
why he was the Export Manager.
Clarence was given an important clerkship in the office.
Bud likewise received Four Dollars a week.
Bud pinched enough postage stamps to make it Four Twenty Five.
Time went on.
And on.
Clarence built up a record for piety, punctuality, faithful fidoism and
fussy attention to details that made every aspiring clerk in the place
eat the carrot of envy every time they thought of him and his little
kuppenheimer.
Bud was the only one who couldn’t see even a dim outline of Clarence’s
sterling virtues.
His psychology was as different from Clarence’s “as day is from night,”
to put it originally yet cleverly.
Bud was a wrecker of rules and a punisher of precedent.
He couldn’t see where certain non-essential things cut any large and
influential ice in the great game of Business.
And he voiced his views with such hobnailed frankness that Clarence
daily expected to see Bud popped from the Payroll.
He cautioned Bud repeatedly in a patronizing high tenor to censor his
stuff or be prepared for the Hiking Certificate.
Time went on some more.
Bud still stuck.
The predictions of Clarence and all the other starchy little stallers
proved to be punk and peanutty.
Comrade Boss seemed to take considerable shine to Bud, but none of the
tall-collared gentry could get it at all.