A few months later, when you have just turned into your eighteenth year
and have saved sixty dollars, three twenty-dollar gold pieces, it is
time to return to Chicago. You tell Mr. Newett. He wishes you well and
says that if you care to remain with _Iron Ore_ he will take you into
partnership when you are twenty. This is a big temptation. You admire
and like your boss. He is a grand person--your idol. Saying goodbye
involves a wrench.
You are now back with R-M staying half an hour at night and getting to
work a half hour earlier in the morning and all is well with the world.
At the time of your first visit to Chicago, line photo-engraving was
not even a whisper, and halftones were not even dreams. On your second
visit, pen drawings are beginning to receive direct reproduction.
Folding machines are unknown; and in a large loft, at long tables,
dozens upon dozens of girls are hand-folding railroad timetables.
This loft is on a level with the designing department. Between the
two there is a brick wall through which, about two feet up from the
floor, has been cut an opening in which there is a heavy, tin-covered
sliding door. When you take 14 × 22 metal plates down to the foundry
to be routed--by someone else, for you don’t like machines--you pass
through this loft, between the girl-adorned tables. You, in turn, are
adorned with the side-whiskers known as mutton-chops--trying to look
older than your years. Also, in accord with the custom of the times,
you wear tight-fitting pants. One day, in returning from the foundry
with a metal plate on your shoulder, you pull back the sliding door and
when you lift one leg to step through the opening the pants rip where
the cloth is tightest. On another occasion when again carrying a plate
on your shoulder your jacket pocket catches on a key at the end of a
paper-cutter shaft and the shoddy that had once proved so disastrous in
your pants now probably averts a serious accident.
Web presses and automatic feeders are also absent. In the basement at
Rand McNally’s there is a battery of drum-cylinders printing James S.
Kirk “American Family Soap” wrappers. The stock is thin, red-glazed
paper, and the sheets a double 24 × 36, or perhaps even larger. You
marvel at the skill with which boys do the feeding; but even greater
is your wonder at the hand-jogging and cutting of these slippery and
flimsy sheets.
Invitations are sent out for an inspection of the composing-room of
the _Chicago Herald_, now newly equipped throughout with Hamilton
labor-saving furniture. You attend. Compositors are sticking type for
the next edition. A little later the _Herald_ places on display its
first web press. This showing is in a ground-floor room, a step or
two down from the street, next door to the Chicago Opera House, where
Kiralphry’s _Black Crook_ is now playing and Eddie Foy is putting
audiences in “stitches.” The press is a single unit standing in a
shallow pit surrounded by a brass rail.
Comes now the winter. It is a Saturday. You are at the home of your
boss. He has invited you to spend the afternoon learning how to paint.
His easel is set up in the basement dining room. He is talking to you
about religion, gravely concerned at learning that you sometimes
attend the Universalist church. He believes you to be a heathen
and suggests that you become converted and join a fundamentalist
church--says that as long as you remain outside the fold and thus are
not a Christian he cannot be interested in helping you become an artist.
The dear man! He wants so much to save your soul. Meanwhile, his good
wife is laying the table for their evening meal. Her smile is motherly.
Maybe she has guessed you were counting the plates. Pleasant odors come
from the kitchen. Our gracious host brings your coat, helps you put it
on, hands you your hat, opens the door and you step out into a Chicago
snowstorm.
At this point the script calls for slow music and heart-rending
sobs--another Kate Claxton in the _Two Orphans_. Also for melodrama!
This is a beautiful snowstorm. The evening is mild and the flakes are
big. They sail lazily through the amber light of the street lamps,
feather the bare branches of trees that print a fantastic pattern
against the red-brick housefronts. The drifts must be at least an inch
deep. And tomorrow ... tomorrow, you will, as always happens on Sunday,
go to a restaurant on Clark Street where you will be served two pork
tenderloins, flanked by a mound of mashed potatoes topped with gravy,
and one other vegetable, and supplemented by bread and butter and a cup
of coffee--all for twenty cents. Joy bells ringing!
A couple of weeks later you are standing at a case in the printing
plant of Knight & Leonard. Mr. Leonard happens to be passing. He stops
and glances at your galley, type arrangement for a catalog cover.
He is interested and asks where you learned job composition. In one
graphically condensed paragraph, dramatically composed, for it has
been prepared in advance in anticipation of this much wished-for
opportunity, you tell the story of your life--and make a momentous
proposition.
The next morning you are seated at a flat-top desk in the second-floor
office. You have your drawing material and are designing a new booklet
cover for the stationery department of A. C. McClurg. It is understood
that when orders for drawing fail you will fill in by setting type.
Now you are, at nineteen, a full-fledged designer and working at a
window opposite Spalding’s. On playing days you watch Pop Anson and his
be-whiskered team enter a barge and depart for the ball park.
One day a young man appears at K & L’s with proofs of halftone
engravings. He has been with the Mathews Northrup Press in Buffalo,
where he had learned the process. He is now starting an engraving plant
in Chicago. K & L print some specimen sheets on coated paper. These
are probably the first halftones ever engraved in Chicago, also the
first printing of halftones. K & L are Chicago’s leading commercial
printers, quality considered. Mr. Knight is a retired Board of Trade
operator. Mr. Leonard is the practical printer. He is also the father
of Lillian Russell. Once, when she is appearing in Chicago, Miss
Russell visits at the office. You are thrilled.
A man, trained in Germany, grinds ink for K & L. He is located on the
floor above the office. You occasionally visit him. He gives you much
good advice. The _Inter Ocean_, located on the next corner, installs a
color press. The K & L ink expert helps get out the first edition.
For two years or more you occupy that desk and never again see the
composing room. During this period, while receiving twenty-four dollars
a week, you marry that young lady of your ten-year-old romance.
The J. M. W. Jeffery Co., show printers, is turning out some swell
posters designed by Will Crane. They are printed from wood-blocks
and are wonders. An artist by the name of Frank Getty is designing
labels in the Chicago sales-office of the Crump Label Company. They
are a glorious departure from the conventional truck of the label
lithographers.
Joe Lyendecker is designing covers in color for paper-bound novels.
They are gorgeous. There are no art magazines or other publications
helpful to designers. You, like others, have a scrap-book made up of
booklet covers, cards and other forms of advertising. A designer by
the name of Bridwell is doing some thrilling work for Mathews Northrup
in Buffalo, a concern that is setting a stiff pace for other railroad
printers. Abbey, Parsons, Smedley, Frost and Pennell, and Charles
Graham in _Harper’s Weekly_, are models for all illustrators.
You are now free-lancing and making designs for Mr. Kasten of the
McClurg stationery department. You have a studio in the new Caxton
building on Dearborn Street. You work all of one day and night and part
of the next day on some drawings for Mr. Kasten. He comes to get them
at four o’clock on the afternoon before Christmas. You tell him you
haven’t eaten since the previous night.
He takes you and your drawings in a cab and stops at a saloon in the
McVickar Theater building and buys you an egg nog. “Drink this,” he
says. “It will put you on your feet until you reach home and can get
dinner.” It is only a glass of milk and egg--and looks harmless. You
get on the Madison Street horse-car, and take a seat up front. There is
straw on the floor to keep your feet warm. You promptly go to sleep.
The car bumps across some tracks and you wake long enough to know your
stop is only two blocks away. In getting off the car the straw tangles
your feet and you seem to be falling over everyone. The sidewalk is not
wide enough for you. This being a new section, the planks are a foot or
more above the ground. You walk in the road.
In these early Nineties no cash is needed to buy a printing outfit,
just an agreement to pay a monthly installment. You buy a Golding
press, a type-stand, a small stone and a few cases of Caslon and an
English text. You are probably itching to play a little with printing.
You do not find time to do more than lay the type. A letter comes from
your wife’s sister in South Dakota. It states that a neighbor’s son or
brother, or some near relative, is in Chicago, that he is interested
in art, and it asks will you look him up. He is a bookkeeper and
cashier in a ground-floor real-estate office at the corner of Clark and
Dearborn. His name is Fred Goudy. He wants to get into the printing
business, in a small way. You tell him of your small outfit and that he
can have it and the benefit of payments made if he will assume future
installments. He agrees.
[Illustration]