to wrestle with a few speckled doubts that began to creep up into his
Thinkery and nibble at his Composure.
Before he had bottled his irritabiliousness, in flowed the serene
Advertising Manager wanting to know whether he should change the copy
in the Ads every decade or so, or let it stand until it fell down from
sheer exhaustion.
When this genius of initiative had ebbed away, the Boss’s telephone
she rang and he grabbed at the instrument like a straw grabs at a
drowning man, thinking that some diversion in way of a date might be in
prospect.
But he found it was the new Buyer wanting to know which of two
quotations he should accept—the higher or the lower. Professor Boss
replied that it was a knotty case to decide off-palm, but from a
superficial cast-over there might be no grievous mistake in accepting
the lower quotation; and the Buyer naturally said he thought the same
way but didn’t feel justified in taking the responsibility of deciding
all alone by hisself.
When Uncle Boss had hung up the receiver he found the bright-eyed
Shipping Clerk standing at his tired side waiting to be wisdomed-up on
whether he should ship 34,999 lbs. at the L. C. L. rate or pay for the
extra lb. and get the C. L. rate.
Major Boss thought a long time but not about what the Shipping
Clerkerino had whispered. He was just trying to make a choice between
murder and suicide. He decided to do neither, but to just hold onto his
Patience as a matter of self-discipline and try to get in his rest
between Foolish Quesions.
For the first six months he seemed to be making considerable prog.,
often getting several moments to himself, during which aforesaid
moments he fumbled with his cufflinkers and pulled his eyebrows to see
if he could get one out at every pull.
But when the calendar year had begun to run down at the heel, the
demands from the Department Heads became so insistent and insupperable
that one day Cap Boss jumped up on his desk, gave one blood icing yell,
swung his arms wildly in the crisp autumn ozone, and dove head-on into
the cuspidor.
When he had been fished out and revived, he seemed strangely calm and
collected. In a voice that had a weird, far-away-over-the-hills sound,
but carrying in its depths an unmistakable quality of determination, he
called in all his hefty, high-class helpers, told them to be seated,
and spake as hereinafter recorded, to wit and to-wot:
“When I engaged you muskrats I had a feeling that this Business was
slightly pied. I thought you could do the Necessary, and use such
commonsense as you perhaps happened to have, in order to push the
Enterprise to the pinnacle of Power.
“I now find that not a rum of you has the initiative of a set of false
whiskers nor the judgment of a jelly-bean. As Buck Passers you’ve got
everything this side of Congress pummeled to a pulp, and when it comes
to stalling, you are all Class A-Super and no mistake.
“You will therefore please take a long jump into the jungles of
Oblivion, and, as a little souvenir of my regard, I propose to present
each man on his way out with a swift kick in the Kupps.”
When the last kanoop had cleared, Commodore Boss got a new outfit
consisting of non-relatived men of EXPERIENCE and while the thought
of the high salaries he had to pay them made him swallow like a cock
eating corn-meal, he got over it when he found he could get off every
afternoon for 18 holes and fish for a fortnight without fretting a
fret.
HOT SKETCH NO. 20
THE EXECUTIVE WITH THE CLERK’S MIND
A ONE-LEGGED manufactory had a little round office boy.
He used to go down to the Post Office every morning on his roller
skates and fetch up the mail in a leather sack.
We forget the exact dimensions of the sack, but the story can go on
without them until such time as we may be able to call them up.
This office boy was a good office boy and did not carve his initials in
his father’s wooden leg, nor hang around the streets watching a safe
moving in.
The manufactory in which he hopped about and drew his Dollar and a
Quarter a week, was not so big as Standard Oil, but it had a side-track
and a time-clock and involved the activities of seventy-five men,
two of which were old women—the Sales & Advertising Manager and the
Proprietor.
Time scuffled on, and the War came, and with it came some new business.
At first the Proprietor and the Sales Manager were a little sore around
the heart at this intrusion upon their days of peace and quiet, spent
largely in cutting up old envelopes for scratch paper.
But gradually they got used to the upset and flurry, and when the
monthly Balance Sheet began to smile and then to grin, it poked their
Ambition in the ribs and the first thing they knew they were actually
craning their shaved necks for business in the Domestic as well as in
the Export arena.
Men think they push their own business to greatness, but they
don’t. Nine out of ten have greatness thrust upon them by national
advertising, but you never hear of them chasing the Agency that did it
up the boulevard trying to catch and laurel it for pulling them out of
the puddle of commercial provincialism.
Here let us state in calm, well modulated tones that we are not
forgetting about the office boy, around whose life this little
narrative is written, or wrotten. We are letting him alone until he
grows into manhood.
The office boy is now grown and so is the business.
The boy is Alfred William Clerkmind, and he is the President of the
whole outfit.
The old proprietor has long since been mounded and marked, and the
Sales & Advertising Manager, of whom we spoke of, or rather, about whom
we spoke about, is still reading Printers Ink and learning how they put
it over.
Alfred William Clerkmind has been so busy growing up with the business
that he has never had time to travel any farther from home than the
one-lunged Country Club for nine holes on a Sunday morning.
His reading has been confined to his Trade Magazine, his home town
daily, and his competitors’ catalogues.
The people he has met socially are the same earspreaders he used to
know as boys and girls in the days when he was juggling up the mail in
the leather sack, size 24″ x 36″.
The men he has met in a business way, all have come down to the
bowlegged burg to sell him something, and so he has always had eager
listeners whenever he talked from the chest out; so he has been denied
the golden privilege of having men tell him to his cone-shaped face
just what they thought of him and his Ideas.
In other phraseology, Alfred William Clerkmind, executive, is Alfred
William Clerkmind, office boy, with different scenery. His arms and
legs are longer, his body thicker, his head fatter than when he licked
stamps, but his psychology and general outlook are the same.
He tells his New York Salesman that one can live for four dollars a
week at the best boarding house in Skunkton with Neapolitan ice cream
every Sunday, and therefore any man should be able to do the same in
New York—or do better, because there’s a bigger choice in Noo Yoark.
Every time it comes to changing copy in the ads, they have to throw
him and blindfold him to keep him from re-writing it himself and
running in a lot of snappy, pungent stuff of the come-one-come-all,
we-strive-to-please variety.
Alfred William doesn’t understand why a salesman should ride in a
Pullman any more than why the Trade shouldn’t wiggle up on its abdomen
and beg for the Goods.
And since he has not the time to travel, nor read, nor meet people who
do, he has no way of getting at the facts of business.
He feels that he must personally ooze into every part of the works at
all times. And, as a consequence, none of the department heads cares
to assume the responsibility of sealing an envelope without getting
Alfie’s “O. K.”
Sometimes Alfie tries to be a good fellow, and thereupon he slaps
somebody a wooden slap on the back. But there’s something in his
playfulness that makes the recip. feel like turning around and
spreading his resentment all over Alfie’s respectable features.
When anybody is relating a humorsome narrative, Alfie sets a certain
time and place to laugh regardless of the development of the story, and
then there’s no telling how long the rafters are going to hold out.
Then just as suddenly he gets back into his coffin and pulls down the
lid.
At such times Alfie’s voice has about as much merriment in it as a sack
of dried apples, but whenever he decides to burst forth, all the little
office gnats have got to laugh too, for fear they will lose their
Fifty Dollar jobs if they don’t.
Emerson says that every institution is the lengthened shadow of the
kanoop that started it, and we are not mentioning this just to show how
clubby we are with Ralph’s sayings, but to clear up any outstanding
doubt that the institution of which Alfred William Clerkmind is the
head and front, and coat, pants and collar-button, reflects in every
detail the spirit of the big, broad, ruddycheeked Captain of Industry
that steers it.
An idea might walk into that Works and hang around for six months, and
not a man in the whole outfit would invite it to come in and sit down.
The most important business of the week that any of the inmates has on
his mind is how to get the shirt back from the Chinaman’s in time for
the Saturday night dance at the Commercial Ath-a-letic Club.
We started this story with the intention of showing how Alfred William
Clerkmind finally made a trip to Kankakee and broadened out. But he
can’t seem to make up his mind which train he will take, and in the
meantime the space alloted to us for this story has run out.
So we can only say in closing that no business can expect to wax
international when the Chief Executive is carrying around with him the
same cow-licked sky-piece that he used when he was bowlegging up the
street with the morning’s mail in a sack.
_Lesson for Today:_ As one grows older, the head should
change inside as well as outside.
HOT SKETCH NO. 21
THE WAR WINNING PATRIOTEER
HE WAS paunchy and broad-beamed and looked like one of Artist Young’s
skippers of industry.
The top of his dome was mercerized but there was a sturdy little hedge
of auburn stubble running west of a line drawn parallel with the top of
his right listener.
This served as a dam to catch the honest perspiration from running down
on his Henry Clay collar.
It also gave him something semi-tangible to comb in the mornings.
His full-orbed jowls were decorated with auburn fenders, parted in the
middle and severely orthodox in their general behavior.
Naturally, with this trimming, he was long on civic righteousness,
religious rallies and other pillar activities.
He was one of those opulent American industrial successes that point
with their thumbs, believe that woman’s place is the home, and go in
and out of an elevator square across, regardless of wedged-in humanity.
Perhaps the most dominant of his virtues was his high-pressure
patriotism. When it came to patriotic oratory he had Patrick Henry
looking like a gaping neutral.
It was only logical, therefore, that he should have become a most
fearless and forensic advocate of Preparedness as soon as the word was
coined. And he did become that same, as hereinbefore itemized.
In 1916, when California decided to elect President Wilson, this
popular pusher for Preparedness was wild with indignation, and tore out
his luxurious side whiskers by the fistful, and jumped up and down on
his little malleable derby.
Everyone with whom he came in contact was assured by him that the
country was heading for helldom on high.
It also gave him a bit of relief to vent his vituperation on Comrade
President for not rushing into War on the day that Kaiser Bill began to
shoot up the high seas like a bar braggart on a busy Saturday night.
Almost any hour you passed his office you could hear him over the
transom telling somebody about the folly of Watchful Waiting,
conciliatory notes and other presidential piffle.
He said that nothing could be nobler than for young Americans to offer
up their lives in defense of flag and country.
And just to show how doggone deep his Nationalism went, he trotted out
and bought a great big American flag for cash and nailed it up back of
his desk.
When Uncle Sam finally decided to throw the little felt kelly into the
international ring, he turned back the lapel of his coat and threw
out his patriotic chest as if he had scored some big personal victory
against the determined resistance of a hundred million Americans.
One day, shortly after the events of which we speak, our War Hero was
found sitting at his Mahogany, with knitted brows and knotted physiog,
steeped in painful, ponderous thought.
Nobody knew just what had struck him until he called his stenographer
and dictated a very private but trenchant letter to the Congressman
of his District and another to his favorite Senator with the wooden
Prince Al, adjuring them to fight against the clause in the War Tax
Bill that threatened to assail his profits.
Having landed a munitions contract in the early days of the war that
netted him a cold, clammy four million in profits, and having drawn
a beautiful mental picture of just how he was going to invest that
million so as to bring a modest return of 100 percent, he was naturally
given over to the ravages of righteous indig when he learned that the
Government proposed to put its large horny fist into his profit bag
and extract a fairly girthful percentage of those profits for use in
helping clothe and feed the young Americans whom he so highly honored
for their Patriotism.
Also he went up in the air ’way beyond anti-aircraft range when he
found that the draft bill contemplated calling into active service
young men between the ages of 20 and 30.
He loudly proclaimed it a ridiculous and preposterous piece of
flumdubble to call upon such young men when every sane man knew that
the Flower of American virility was between the ages of 31 and 41.
His son was 24 and he was 54.
When the first Liberty Bond issue was floated he got sort of backed
into an uncomfortable corner and spent several tortuous nights and
difficult days wondering how he was going to hurdle this issue without
barking his patriotic shins.
At last, after looking up Uncle Sam in Bradstreets, and convincing
himself that Uncle S. would not go bust right away, he made up his mind
to plunge, irrespective of his own future comfort.
So he went down to his bank and bought a nice One Hundred Dollar Bond
which he offered to sell to any of his employes who might not have a
chance to get to the polls before they closed.
The next day he took steps to have his son exempted from the draft on
the grounds that he was the sole support of his motor car—but of course
assured the Board of the young patriot’s eagerness to trek for the
trenches.
He also stopped long enough in his work of figuring out a 100% increase
in the selling price of his wares to get an assortment of little allied
flags and stick them on the hood of his Packard.
In addition, he bought a Red Cross button and put it in the aperature
of his coat lapel.
Further, he allowed one of his clerks to spend several hours on
the Firm’s time to collect a fund for the Red Cross from the other
employes, and he himself led off the list with a Dollar which nobody
had the nerve to collect from him after he wrote down his influential
name.
In fact, patriotism and practical helpfulness to the Nation ran rampant
through his whole family.
His wife started to knit an army sweater at the outbreak of the War,
and as we go to press she is still knitting it. She has got as far as
casting off the neck.
His daughter also started in energetically to make Red Cross bandages,
and every week or so she went down to Headquarters for an hour to get
in out of the cold while waiting for some friend for tea.
When final victory perched upon the banner of the Allied Cause and The
Boys came dragging home to a jobless civic life, this patriotic pillar
of Preparedness whose unselfish service to his country in time of
national need had so greatly lightened the nation’s burden, threw the
whole tonnage of his influence against The Soldiers’ Bonus Bill and
other Paternalistic Notions, declaring them pernicious and Economically
Unsound.
He also wrote a book entitled “How We Won The War” and dedicated it to
his son and daughter.
_Lesson for Today:_ Sherman was right.
HOT SKETCH NO. 22
TYPICAL AMERICAN AND CRITICAL AMERICAN
THERE was once a comfortable piece of suet who considered himself a
Typical American and oozed oleaginous sentiments of Lofty Patriotism
through a three-dimensional Mid Western brogue every time he saw a good
opening.
He loved America so much that he used to spend six months out of every
year Abroad with his big cigars and his fat wife. He liked to get up
on a barrel in every port he backed into, and tell the natives a few
things about Our great liberty-loving America where every man was free
to spit on the sidewalk if he wanted to.
He took a Keen Delight in roasting everything that was non-American
and making himself miserable every time he turned a foreign corner. He
used to grease down three 18-inch collars every day pointing out to
his billow-chinned Helpmeet how senseless These Here Foreigners were
for doing things this way instead of doing them that way. Any time
he overlooked anything for condemnation, the Little One (Ton) would
heave-to and remind him of it in a whistling nasaletto that made you
instinctively hang onto your hat.
From two to four hours were put in each day of the calender month
grousing about the cold rooms, cold hotels, cold shops, cold theatres,
cold everything. It made them both hot to think of the cold. During
these protest meetings, Typical American would tread the floor heavily
and work his cigar angrysomely from one side of his gasser to the other
and then back again, and take a solemn oath before his Maker that if
he ever got back home without cracking he would turn on the steam-heat
until the walls began to run like sap.
Another thing that always added to the merriment of their foreign
philandering was the Customs. Every time an inspector requested Typ.
Am. or his Better Half Ton to open up a piece of luggage, Typ would
bring down upon the inquisitive little inspectorial head a torrent of
biting injective that would have made it crawl under the culvert in
shame had it been able to get next to the linguistic delivery.
For the inconveniences and jarring out-of-dateness of Foreign Travel
were but a mild rash when it came to the question of power to annoy. It
was the systematic pillaging of Typ and Mrs. Typ that proved to be the
big aching carbuncle.
Every time Typ went to pay a taxi fare, they tried to flam him out of
two or three cents and he used to have to use up about seven dollars’
worth of American energy arguing the hold-up with the robber at the
wheel and trying to prove to him in excited expletives that the legal
Scale of Rates showed 20 cents for two miles instead of 22 cents.
When Typ would register at a hotel he always had to get into the ring
for ten rounds with the Swiss Cheese in the long prince albert before
he could get anything like the rate and the room he wanted. What he
didn’t tell the Concierge down stairs about his old hotel he would tell
the porters up stairs when they were juggling in the baggage.
Meanwhile Mrs. Typ would be examining the curtains and things, and
giving the pirates a piece of her mind for charging Four Dollars a day
for one double room and bath when they should have had the whole floor
for that price.
Typ got chronic indigestion from scrapping over the price of his
dejeuner, and Mrs. Typ swore regularly every morning that she’d see the
buccaneers in the sixteenth sub-basement of Gehenna before she’d pay 18
cents for two measley boiled eggs—then she’d go ahead and order them.
Their daily sight-seeing and shopping excursions in all foreign
countries were continually marred by the petty pilferings and
short-change manoeuvering of foreign highbinders, and many a night as
they sat fingering their finances in the hotel lobby and adding up how
much they had squandered during the day, they would discover where they
had been bilked of anywhere from seventy-five cents to one dollarr and
a quarterrrrrr besides finding among their small change a worthless
Portuguese coin that some low-down dragoman had handed them instead of
a piastre.
When Typ and Mrs. Typ returned to America at the end of the year
fagged to a frazzle and pining for just one peep at the Land of the
Free and the home of the Oil Trust, their joy knew no anchor. They
could hardly wait for their ship to bring them in sight of the Lady of
Liberty and they pedaled the deck like jailed jaguars and Typ smoked
cigar after cigar and spit over the deck-rail in wild abandon.
At last they arrived at New York and were so anxious to set feet on
terry firmy that their eagerness carried them down the gang-plank
before the Veterinary had come Aboard, and so they ran up against a
Minion of the Law who gave them a call that reverberated for miles
along the Palisades and made the Goddess of Liberty almost spill her
torch. Whereupon they both got crimson back of their large ears and
apologized profusely and stepped all over each other getting back into
line where they crouched for seven hours without moving a muscle of the
map.
Before the day was wholly gone, they were permitted to go into the
Customs House, and the Inspector told them to open all baggage,
and they said Yessir and got busy with the keys, and for the next
hour-and-a-half were bowing and bending over 18 boxes and bags, and
pulling things apart and trying their very doggondest to prove that
they were on the level.
When they had at last begun to feel that they had proved their
innocence, the Inspector, with his arm dug shoulder-deep in the last of
the trunks, fished up a pill-box and all bets were off again until he
had opened it and shaken the pills out and run his finger-nail around
the crevices and turned it upside down and inside out, and put it to
his ear and smelled it and trained an X-Ray machine on it, and then
declared everything was all right and they could depart in peace.
Thanking the Inspector for his interest, and with a sigh of relief that
was full of humility and unshed tears, they got a couple of porters to
wheel their stuff out to a Taxi, and in the fullness of a swift joy
that came upon them when they got outside and sniffed the free American
winter air, they gave the two portering gentlemen a crisp dollar bill
for the service.
Whereupon the gentlemen looked at the bill like it was some kind of
curiosity, then looked at each other and groaned, and then gave the
givers a look that scared them to a pope’s purple and made them finger
further with the purse-string until the gentlemen had grunted their
approval and departed.
When they arrived at their hotel they found they had only a couple of
hundred dollars to pay the taxi fare with, but they managed to get by
with it without inciting any murderous thought in the breast of the
driver, and went in and registered.
When they informed the Room Clerk that they had not made any
reservations he said he was sorry but everything was taken except one
room without bath adjoining the boiler-house which was being held for
a certain gentleman who had wired for it several months ago. Then King
Klerk tapped his fingers on the desk and looked boredly out beyond
their square heads and repeated that he was sorry.
At this, Mr. and Mrs. Typ got down on their knees and said the Litany,
and the room clerk thawed and told them they could have the room for
$20 a day if they barked quick. They barked. They also thanked him
from the bottom of their grateful American hearts and told him whenever
he came to their town to look them up.
When they had squeezed into their little ingrowing room they found that
it had only one window, and that was an opening in the ceiling about
the size of a silver dollar, but fifty times the value. They also found
the porters hanging around for a tip and forgot that it was the custom
at home to fee the beetles a quarter every time they did something
instead of giving the whole bunch a couple of shillings at the end of a
week’s work. They apologized for this oversight and then settled down
for a little rest.
The temperature of the room was between 300 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit
and Mr. Typ began to sweat like a brewery horse and got up to pull off
his coat, but found the room was too cramped to do it and so he took
off his necktie instead.