_Mr. Bill Nye, Hudson, Wis._--DEAR SIR: I hope you will pardon me for
addressing you on a matter of pure business, but I have heard that you
are not averse to going out of your way to do a favor now and then to
those who are sincere and appreciative.
I have learned from a friend that you have been around all over the
west, and so I have taken the liberty of writing you to ask what you
think would be the chances of success for a young man if he were to go
to Kansas to enter the drug business.
I am a practical young druggist 23 years of age and have some money--a
few hundred dollars--with which to go into business. Would you advise
Kansas or Colorado as a good part of the west for that business?
I have also written some for the press, but with little success. I
enclose you a few slips cut from the papers in which these articles
originally appeared. I send stamp for reply and hope you will answer me,
even though your time may be taken up pretty well by other matters.
Respectfully yours,
_Adolph Jaynes_, Lock-Box 604.
HUDSON, WIS., Oct. 1.--_Mr. Adolph Jaynes, Lock-Box 604._--DEAR SIR:
Your favor of late date is at hand, and I take pleasure in writing this
dictated letter to you, using the columns of the Chicago _Daily News_ as
a delicate way of reaching you. I will take the liberty of replying to
your last question first, if you pardon me, and I say that you would do
better, no doubt at once, in a financial way, to go on with your drug
business than to monkey with literature.
In the first place, your style of composition is like the present style
of dress among men. It is absolutely correct, and therefore it is
absolutely like that of nine men out of every ten we meet. Your style of
writing has a mustache on it, wears a three-button cutaway of some
Scotch mixture, carries a cane, and wears a straight stand-up collar and
scarf. It is so correct and so exactly in conformity with the prevailing
style of composition, and your thoughts are expressed so thoroughly like
other people's methods of dressing up their sentences and sand-papering
the soul out of what they say, that I honestly think you would succeed
better by trying to subsist upon the quick sales and small profits which
the drug trade insures.
Now, let us consider the question of location:
Seriously, you ought to look over the ground yourself, but as you have
asked me to give you my best judgment on the question of preference as
between Kansas and Colorado, I will say without hesitation that, if you
mean by the drug business the sale of sure-enough drugs, medicines,
paints, oils, glass, putty, toilet articles, and prescriptions carefully
compounded, I would _not_ go to Kansas at this time.
If you would like to go to a flourishing country and put out a big
basswood mortar in front of your shop in order to sell the tincture of
damnation throughout bleeding Kansas, now is your golden opportunity.
Now is the accepted time. If it is the great, big, burning desire of
your heart to go into a town of 2,000 people and open the thirteenth
drug store in order that you may stand behind a tall black walnut
prescription case day in and day out, with a graduate in one hand and a
Babcock fire-extinguisher in the other, filling orders for whiskey made
of stump-water and the juice of future punishment, you will do well to
go to Kansas. It is a temperance state and no saloons are allowed there.
All is quiet and orderly, and the drug business is a great success.
You can run a dummy drug store there with two dozen dreary old glass
bottles on the shelves, punctuated by the hand of time and the Kansas
fly of the period, and with a prohibitory law at your back and a tall,
red barrel in the back room filled with a mixture that will burn great
holes into nature's heart and make the cemetery blossom as the rose, and
in a few years you can sell enough of this justly celebrated preparation
for household, scientific and experimental purposes only to fill your
flabby pockets with wealth and paint the pure air of Kansas a bright and
inflammatory red.
If you sincerely and earnestly yearn for a field where you may go forth
and garner an honest harvest from the legitimate effort of an upright
soda fountain and free and open sale of slippery elm in its
unadulterated condition, I would go to some state where I would not have
to enter into competition with a style of pharmacy that has the unholy
instincts and ambitions of a blind pig, I would not go into the field
where red-eyed ruin simply waited for a prescription blank, not
necessarily for publication, but simply as a guaranty of good faith, in
order that it may bound forth from behind the prescription case and
populate the poor-houses and the paupers' nettle-grown addition to the
silent city of the dead.
The great question of how best to down the demon rum is before the
American people, and it will not be put aside until it is settled; but
while this is being attended to, Mr. Jaynes, I would start a drug store
farther away from the center of conflict and go on joyously, sacrificing
expensive tinctures, compounds, and syrups at bed-rock prices.
Go on, Mr. Jaynes, dealing out to the yearning, panting public, drugs,
paints, oils, glass, putty, varnish, patent medicines, and prescriptions
carefully compounded, with none to molest or make afraid, but shun, oh
shun the wild-eyed pharmacopeia that contains naught but the festering
fluid so popular in Kansas, a compound that holds crime in solution and
ruin in bulk, that shrivels up a man's gastric economy, and sears great
ragged holes into his immortal soul. Take this advice home to your heart
and you will ever command the hearty cooperation of "yours for health,"
as the late Lydia E. Pinkham so succinctly said.
_Bill Nye._