Up to my graduation from high school my ambition was the ministry. I was an earnest Bible Student. The greatest game we had in our house was repeating Bible verses. We took turns, as in a spelling bee, going around the circle, until all dropped out save one, I was always that one. I had memorized more verses than anyone I met.
Often the minister dropped in, but he was no competitor of mine in a Bible competition. I knew several times as many verses. At the age of seven I was writing sermons and setting them in my father’s printing-office. Often in prayer-meetings I spoke a short sermon. Thus all came to regard me as a coming pulpit orator. I was made valedictorian of my class at school. My graduating essay was on ambition, and I still remember how I denounced it, how I pleaded for poverty and service.
During the following summer I preached every Sunday in a country school where I taught. The school was twelve miles from my home, but I walked there with my luggage. I found that no one on the school board could read or write. The head of the school board and leader in his community gained his distinction through a barrel of whisky which stood in the corner of his living room. It had floated ashore from a wreck on Lake Michigan. The man was generous with it, so his home became the headquarters of the community.
The only other furniture in the room consisted of a wood-stove and three soap boxes. Sitting on one of those soap boxes, I struggled to convince the illiterate man that I was qualified to teach. I did so at last by reading a joke from an almanac. That pamphlet constituted his entire library, and my reading of it was a revelation to him. That was another lesson. Not that I have dealt largely with illiterate people, but with very simple people. And I love them. I love and know their natural instincts and reactions.
Then came the question of pay. They were planning two months of summer school. We went to the home of the treasurer and counted the district resources. They amounted to $79.50. and I was offered that sum for my teaching.
I found a farm home which had a new organ, and two girls who wanted to play. I offered to give them music lessons, plus one dollar per week, for my board. My savings that summer amounted to $35 per month. It was a long, long time after entering business before I saved as much.
I was the teacher in that community on week-days and the minister on Sundays. And I learned there every day new lessons about people. That, you will realize as you go along, is the most I have ever learned.
When that summer was over I went to Chicago. Mother was visiting at the home of Doctor Mills in Brighton Park, and I joined her. The day after my arrival was Sunday. In the afternoon the minister came to call. He was ill. The next day he was leaving for an extended vacation. He told us how he dreaded to preach that night, so mother suggested that I should relieve him. I was a student for the ministry.
I recognized that as a crisis. I had been growing away from mother’s strict ideas of religion. I knew that she could not approve of me if she knew me as I was. She was a fundamentalist. She believed in a personal devil, in hell fire, and in all the miracles. To her the Bible was a history, inspired by its writers and to be taken literally. The earth was created in six days. Eve was derived from Adam’s rib. William Jennings Bryan would have been mother’s idol.
I had been growing away from her orthodox conceptions, but I had not dared to tell her. It would mean the destruction of her fondest illusions. But during the summer I had prepared a sermon based on my ideas of religion. It countenanced the harmless joys of life which had been barred to me. It argued against hell fire, against infant damnation, against the discipline I knew. It even questioned the story of the creation and of Jonah and the whale.
I resolved to deliver the sermon that night and face the consequences. I was eighteen then. Never since then have I dared to face a crisis like that. Unless I entered the ministry, I felt that my school days were ended. I had come to Chicago to decide on my course, and this was the test.
That evening in the pulpit remains one of my clearest memories. There were eight hundred people in the audience, averaging twice my age. But I forgot them all. Mother was the only auditor whom I had in mind. I knew that the minister who sat behind me was mother’s friend. His orthodox ideas agreed with hers. So I felt myself a radical of the deepest dye. Never since have I faced, to my knowledge, such unanimous opposition. That sermon I consider the most daring event of my life.
As the sermon progressed the minister grew restless. Mother’s face was an enigma. The audience appeared appalled. When I finished, the minister pronounced a trembling benediction. The audience filed out in silence. Not a man or woman came to greet me. Then I knew myself an outcast from the flocks I had hoped to lead.
Mother walked home in silence. She said no word to me that night, but I knew that I had brought myself to the parting of the ways. The next day she asked me to lunch with her downtown. At a table on Dearborn Street she opened the subject by stating that I no longer was her son. I waited for nothing further, but arose and walked out on the street. There I closed the door forever on a clergyman’s career.
Mother was never the same to me again. She could not forgive my delinquency. We rarely met after that day. She lived to see me successful in other occupations, but she never discussed them with me. I had blighted her ambitions. But if advertising had ever been made to me as oppressive as religion, I would have abandoned that. I have, in fact, quit many a big account because of somewhat similar reasons. I believe every man should do so. No man can succeed in any line where he finds himself in disagreement and where unhappiness results. I consider business as a game and I play it as a game. That is why I have been, and still am, so devoted to it.
On that fateful day, out on Dearborn Street, I felt in my pocket and found only three dollars. The rest of my savings had been left in Michigan. I thought of Spring Lake, where my uncle had a fruit farm. It was fruit-picking time, so I resolved to get there and pick fruit.
I went down to the harbor and found several lumber vessels from Muskegon. The captain of one of them let me work my way across as choreboy in the kitchen. From Muskegon I walked to Spring Lake, and arranged to pick fruit for my uncle and others at $1.25 per day. Those earnings, with my savings as a school-teacher, gave me over $100. But I needed $200 for a course at business college.
Grandfather, who lived at my uncle’s home, admired the way I worked. He called me Mr. Stick-to-itiveness. There were two of us boys on the farm, cousins of the same age. I worked sixteen hours a day, my cousin worked as little as he could. So grandfather decided to back me. All he had in the world was $100, saved to bury him. He offered that to me on condition that I assume the burial expense when it came. Of course I did.
That was another crisis in my career. There were two grandsons of similar age. So far as anyone knew, there was no choice in ability. I, being a backslider, had to face considerable disapproval. But I had saved $100, and I worked. The other boy had saved nothing, and he did not like to work. So I was the one who secured the help which changed the current of my life. The other boy became a locomotive fireman. So it has been in many a juncture I have witnessed since. The saver and the worker get the preference of the men who control opportunities. And often that preference proves to be the most important thing in life.
With $200 I went to Grand Rapids and entered Swensburg’s Business College. It was a ridiculous institution. “Professor” Swensburg wrote a fine Spencerian hand. With that single qualification he became a business teacher, but he taught us nothing. His whole conception of business as we saw it was confined to penmanship. We might as well have spent those six months in a university studying dead languages. We were supposed to graduate as bookkeepers, but all we learned of bookkeeping was some stilted figures.
The real teacher was a man named Welton. We called him “Professor” Welton. He died a janitor. His idea of teaching was to ridicule us boys and make us feel insignificant. His phrases dripped with sarcasm. His favorite form of torture was a spelling lesson with some catch words which none could spell. It showed us how hopeless we were. In one lesson, I remember, he inserted the word charavari. Not a boy could spell it. Then he asked us to consult the dictionary and bring the word in the next morning. But none of us could find it, as he knew. We could not get the first three letters right. That gave him opportunity to comment on what boobs we were.
“Professor” Swensburg gave us a morning lecture. His object seemed also to make us fell humble. Perhaps that is a good qualification for a bookkeeper who expects to grow old on a high stool. I am inclined to think it is. His lessons in humility consisted in assuring us that there were bookkeeping jobs awaiting us at $4.50 per week when our course was finished. Not a word of enlightenment, none of encouragement. Just ridicule and sarcasm directed at us students from his pompous heights. Still he rightly estimated us, I think. Anyone who paid more to a Swensburg graduate paid too much.
I was nearing the end of my course, also of my resources. I began to contemplate going back to the farm. Then one morning, “Professor” Swensburg brought a postal card to his lecture, and used that as his subject. He said, “I have often told you boys that positions awaited you at $4.50 per week somewhere. Now I have the actual evidence. It comes on a postal, not in a letter, to save postage. A business man in Grand Rapids writes me that he has a bookkeeping position at $4.50 per week for one of you, and he asks me to send him a candidate. Don’t all of you apply at once, but whoever among you wants that position should come to my office after the lecture and I will give him the name and address.”
The other boys laughed. It was a new joke on their worthlessness. But I edged toward the door. When the “Professor” finished his lecture and started downstairs I was only one step behind.
He gave me a letter to E. G. Studley, and I went to interview him. He was interested in the Grand Rapids Felt Boot Company. The young man who had kept the books had been advanced to superintendent. They wanted some one in his place. If that superintendent considered me qualified, I could have the position.
I went to him and secured it. The bookkeeping was a minor item. I was expected to sweep the floors and wash the windows. I was also to be errand boy. The chief condition was that I was never to wear a coat. The superintendent was very democratic. He wanted no “dudes” about him. In the office and on errands downtown I was always to appear in my shirt sleeves. I could qualify for that position because I had two shirts left.
Then came the question of living on $4.50 per week. I found a small room with a widow who wanted a man in the house. That cost me one dollar per week. In a restaurant over a grocery store a dingy man served dingy meals at $2.50 per week. They were beyond my reach. I had to consider my laundry. So I arranged with him to miss two meals a week and get board for $2.25.
I was a young man, active and ever hungry. Always the great question was, what meals to miss. I tried breakfast, but morning found me starving. I tried luncheon, but that lost meal would spoil my afternoon. My only way was to race by the restaurant at night and go to bed. And that I could not do unless I crossed the street. The smell of the food would tempt me to forget the shirt sleeves which formed so great a factor in my work.
That sounds rather pitiful, but it wasn’t. It was a great advance over my cedar-swamp experience. I slept alone in a bed, instead of on a hay mow with railroad section men. So long as we are going upward, nothing is a hardship. But when we start down, even from a marble mansion to a cheaper palace, that is hard.
The Felt Boot Company comprised some of the leading business men of Grand Rapids. Our sales came in winter only, so all summer long we borrowed money to get ready for those sales. The directors endorsed our notes. One of my duties was to go around and secure endorsements and renewals. In that way I met Mr. M. R. Bissell, president of the Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company.
He was a genial man, and I saw in him my chance to a higher salary. One day I waylaid to him on his way to lunch. I pictured the difficulties of a young man living on $4.50 per week. There was no need to exaggerate. There on his way to lunch I told him of the two meals weekly I was obliged to miss. Above all, I pictured my dream of pie. I knew a restaurant which served pie at dinner, but the board was $3.50 per week. My greatest ambition at that time was to get that pie.
From him I learned another kink in human nature. Struggle and poverty did not appeal to him. He had known them well, and he considered them good for a fellow. But he loved pie, and had never been denied it. So he invited me home to eat pie. And he arranged for a salary of $6 per week so I could have pie every day.
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