“Oh!” I said, “tomatoes and peaches and com, sardines, and salmon,
and--”
“Yes!” Perkins broke in, “and codfish, and cod-liver oil, and kerosene
oil, and cottonseed-oil, and axle-grease and pie! Everything! But what
don't they put in cans?”
I couldn't think of a thing. I told Perkins so. He smiled and made a
large circle in the air with his right forefinger.
“Cheese!” he said. “Did you ever see a canned cheese?”
I tried to remember that I had, but I couldn't. I remembered potted
cheese, in nice little stone pots, and in pretty little glass pots.
Perkins sneered.
“Yes,” he said, “and how did you open it?”
“The lids unscrewed,” I said.
Perkins waved away the little stone and the little glass pots.
“No good!” he cried. “They don't appeal to the great American person. I
see,” he said, screwing up one eye--“I see the great American person. It
has a nickel-plated, patent Perkins Can-opener in its hand. It goes into
its grocer shop. It asks for cheese. The grocer shows it plain cheese by
the slice. No, sir! He shows it potted cheese. No, sir! What the great
American person wants is cheese that has to be opened with a
can-opener. Good cheese, in patent, germ-proof, air-tight, water-tight,
skipper-tight cans, with a label in eight colors. Full cream, full
weight, full cans; picture of a nice clean cow and red-cheeked dairymaid
in short skirts on front of the label, and eight recipes for Welsh
rabbits on the back.” He paused to let this soak into me, and then
continued:
“Individual cheese! Why make cheese the size of a dish-pan? Because
grandpa did? Why not make them small? Perkins's Reliable Full Cream
Cheese, just the right size for family use, twenty-five cents a can,
with a nickel-plated Perkins Can-opener, free with each can. At all
grocers.”
That was the beginning of the Fifth Street Church, as you shall see.
We bought a tract of land well outside of Chicago, and, to make it sound
well on our labels, we named it Cloverdale. This was Perkins's idea.
He wanted a name that would harmonize with the clean cow and the rosy
milkmaid on our label.
We owned our own cows, and built our own dairy and cheese factory, and
made first-class cheese. As each cheese was just the right size to fit
in a can, and as the rind would protect the cheese, anyway, it was
not important to have very durable cans, so we used a can that was all
cardboard, except the top and bottom. Perkins insisted on having the top
and bottom of tin, so that the purchaser could have something to open
with a can-opener; and he was right. It appealed to the public.
The Perkins cheese made a hit, or at least the Perkins advertising
matter did. We boomed it by all the legitimate means, in magazines,
newspapers, and street-cars, and on bill-boards and kites; and we got
out a very small individual can for restaurant and hotel use. It got to
be the fashion to have the waiter bring in a can of Perkins's cheese,
and show the diner that it had not been tampered with, and then open it
in the diner's sight.
We ran our sales up to six hundred thousand cases the first year, and
equalled that in the first quarter of the next year; and then the cheese
trust came along, and bought us out for a cool eight-hundred thousand,
and all they wanted was the good-will and trade-mark. They had a factory
in Wisconsin that could make the cheese more economically. So we were
left with the Cloverdale land on our hands, and Perkins decided to make
a suburb of it.
Perkins's idea was to make Cloverdale a refined and aristocratic suburb;
something high-toned and exclusive, with Queen Anne villas, and no
fences; and he was particularly strong on having an ennobling religious
atmosphere about it. He said an ennobling religious atmosphere was
the best kind of a card to draw to--that the worse a man was, the more
anxious he was to get his wife and children settled in the neighborhood
of an ennobling religious atmosphere.
So we had a map of Cloverdale drawn, with wide streets running one
way and wide avenues crossing the streets at right angles, and our
old cheese factory in a big square in the centre of the town. It was
a beautiful map, but Perkins said it lacked the ennobling religious
atmosphere; so the first thing he did was to mark in a few churches. He
began at the lower left-hand corner, and marked in a church at the corner
of First Street and First Avenue, and put another at the corner of Second
Street and Second Avenue, and so on right up on the map. This made a
beautiful diagonal row of churches from the upper right-hand corner to
the lower left-hand corner of the map, and did not miss a street. Perkins
pointed out the advertising value of the arrangement:
“Cloverdale, the Ideal Home Site.
A Church on Every Street.
Ennobling Religious Atmosphere.
Lots on Easy Payments.”
The old cheese factory was to be the Cloverdale Club-house, and we set
to work at once to remodel it. We had the stalls knocked out of the
cow-shed, and made it into a bowling-alley, and added a few cupolas and
verandas to the factory, and had the latest styles of wall-paper put on
the walls, and in a few days we had a first-class club-house.
But we did not stop there. Perkins was bound that Cloverdale should be
first-class in every respect, and it was a pleasure to see him marking
in public institutions. Every few minutes he would think of a new
one and jot it down on the map; and every time he jotted down an
opera-house, or a school-house, or a public library, he would raise the
price of the lots, until we had the place so exclusive, I began to fear
I couldn't afford to live there. Then he put in a street-car line and
a water and gas system, and quit; for he had the map so full of things
that he could not put in another one without making it look mussy.
One thing Perkins insisted on was that there should be no factories. He
said it would be a little paradise right in Cook County. He liked the
phrase, “Paradise within Twenty Minutes of the Chicago Post-office,”
so well that he raised the price of the lots another ten dollars all
around.
Then we began to advertise. We did not wait to build the churches nor
the school-house, nor any of the public institutions. We did not even
wait to have the streets surveyed. What was the use of having twenty or
thirty streets and avenues paved when the only inhabitants were Perkins
and I and the old lady who took care of the Club-house? Why should we
rush ourselves to death to build a school-house when the only person
in Cloverdale with children was the said old lady? And she had only one
child, and he was forty-eight years old, and in the Philippines.
We began to push Cloverdale hard. There wasn't an advertising scheme
that Perkins did not know, and he used them all. People would open their
morning mail, and a circular would tell them that Cloverdale had an
ennobling religious atmosphere. Their morning paper thrust a view of
the Cloverdale Club-house on them. As they rode down-town in the
street-cars, they read that Cloverdale was refined and exclusive. The
bill-boards announced that Cloverdale lots were sold on the easy payment
plan. The magazines asked them why they paid rent when Cloverdale land
was to be had for little more than the asking. Round-trip tickets from
Chicago to Cloverdale were furnished any one who wanted to look at the
lots. Occasionally, we had a free open-air vaudeville entertainment.
Our advertising campaign made a big hit. There were a few visitors who
kicked because we did not serve beer with the free lunches we gave, but
Perkins was unyielding on that point. Cloverdale was to be a temperance
town, and he held that it would be inconsistent to give free beer. But
the trump card was our guarantee that the lots would advance twenty per
cent, within twelve months. We could do that well enough, for we made
the price ourselves; but it made a fine impression, and the lots began
to sell like hot cakes.
[Illustration: 80]
There were ten streets in Cloverdale (on paper) and ten avenues (also on
paper); and Perkins used to walk up and down them (not on the paper, but
between the stakes that showed their future location), and admire the
town of Cloverdale as it was to be. He would stand in front of the plot
of weeds that was the site of the opera-house, and get all enrapt and
enthusiastic just thinking how fine that opera-house would be some day;
and then he would imagine he was on our street-car line going down
to the library. But the thing Perkins liked best was to go to church.
Whenever he passed one of the corner lots that we had set aside for a
church, he would take off his hat and look sober, as a man ought when he
has suddenly run into an ennobling religious atmosphere.
One day a man came out from Chicago, and, after looking over our ground,
told us he wanted to take ten lots; but none suited him but the ten
facing on First Avenue at the corner of First Street. Perkins tried to
argue him into taking some other lots, but he wouldn't. Perkins and I
talked it over, and, as the man wanted to build ten houses, we decided
to sell him the lots.
We thought a town ought to have a few houses, and so far Cloverdale had
nothing but the Club-house. As we had previously sold all the other lots
on First Street, we had no place on that street to put the First Street
Church, so Perkins rubbed it off the map, and marked it at the corner of
First Avenue and Fifth Street.
The next day a man came down who wanted a site for a grocery. We were
glad to see him, for every first-class town ought to have a grocery; but
Perkins balked when he insisted on having the lot at the corner of Sixth
Avenue and Sixth Street that we had set aside for the First Methodist
Church. Perkins said he would never feel quite himself again if he had
to think that he had been taking off his hat to a grocery every time he
passed that lot. It would lower his self-respect. I was afraid we were
going to lose the grocer to save Perkins's self-respect. Then we saw we
could move the church to the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifth Street.
When we once got those churches on the move, there seemed to be no
stopping. We doubled the price, but still people wanted those lots, and
in the end they got them; and as soon as we sold out a church lot,
we moved the church up to Fifth Street, and in a bit Perkins got
enthusiastic over the idea, and moved the rest of the churches there on
his own accord. He said it would be a great “ad.”--a street of churches;
and it would concentrate the ennobling religious atmosphere, and make it
more powerful.
All this time the lots continued to sell beyond our expectations; and
by the end of the year we had advanced the price of lots one hundred per
cent., and were considering another advance. We did not think it fair to
the sweltering Chicago public to advance the price without giving it a
chance to get the advantage of our fresh air and pure water at the old
price, so we told them of the contemplated rise. We let them know it by
means of bill-boards and newspapers and circular letters and magazines;
and a great many people gladly availed themselves of our thoughtfulness
and our guarantee that we would advance the price twenty-per cent, on
the first day of June.
So many, in fact, bought lots before the advance that we had none left
to advance. Perkins came to me one morning, with tears in his eyes,
and explained that we had made a promise, and could not keep it. We
had agreed to advance the lots twenty per cent., and we had nothing to
advance.
“Well, Perky,” I said, “it is no use crying. What is done is done. Are
you sure there are no lots left?”
“William,” he said, seriously, “we think a great deal of these churches,
don't we?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed. “We do! We think an ennobling religious
atmosphere--” But he cut me short.
“William,” he said, “do you know what we are doing? We talk about our
ennobling religious atmosphere, but we are standing in the path of
progress. A mighty wave of reform is sweeping through Christendom.
The new religious atmosphere is sweeping out the old religious
atmosphere. I can feel it. Brotherly love is knocking out the sects.
Shall Cloverdale cling to the old, or shall it stand as the leader in
the movement for a reunited Church?”