Belles on Their Toes

by Frank B. Gilbreth

  There was a wait of another week, during which it seemed certain that the course would have to be canceled. And then acceptances arrived from abroad—from a Japanese engineer, a Belgian technologist, and a representative of a British food concern.

  That made eight, and when the tuition money was received, and deposited by Martha, the bank balance was enough to guarantee that the family could stay together for another twelve months, that Anne could finish Michigan the next year, and that Ernestine could enroll at Smith.

  Mother planned, if possible, to run the course for five years, with a new group of students each year. By that time, Anne and Ernestine would have their diplomas, and Martha and Frank would be in college. That would mean only seven children to look out for at home, and Mother would be able to travel more, seeking consulting jobs. She hoped that in five years she’d be able to convince employers that she could work in a man’s field.

  On the night before the course opened, Mother told us she was going to need our cooperation.

  “I know you’ll all keep out of the office and the laboratory,” she said, “unless it’s something very important. And I hope you’ll welcome all eight pupils, and treat them like friends.”

  We said we didn’t know about that “friends” business. We knew the school was necessary from a financial standpoint. Frankly, though, we weren’t enthusiastic about a group of outsiders coming into the house and monopolizing Mother’s time.

  “They’re probably old cranks who are going to complain they can’t concentrate because of the noise,” Frank said.

  “No they’re not,” Mother insisted. “I’ve met them, and they’re all as nice as can be. I think you children will be fond of them.”

  “I know those old ones,” Martha nodded. “Dandruff on their blue serge suits, and always trying to get you in a corner to tell you about your dimpled little knees.”

  “Old ones don’t talk about dimpled knees,” Ernestine said. “They still talk about your trim little ankles.”

  “They’re not old,” Mother smiled. “At least not very. One of them is a woman—Miss Lies. She’s from Macy’s.”

  “Probably with a silky black moustache and mannish tweeds,” Ernestine hooted.

  Tom also was not pleased about the outlook, especially when he found out that one of the group was an Englishman.

  “As if I ain’t got enough work already,” he complained, and with a good deal of justification. “Just keep them out of my kitchen, that’s all. Especially the Limey—and that goes for the Jap, too.”

  He fished in a drawer for a pencil and paper, and made a great show of inventorying his tools, so that he’d know if anything disappeared.

  We hid on a landing half-way up the stairs, and watched Mother’s pupils arrive. The first was Mr. Yoyogo, the Japanese engineer. Tom, dressed in a clean butcher’s apron and his chef’s cap, answered the bell and let him in.

  “You must be Yoyo,” Tom said sullenly, purposely dropping the “Mister,” but inadvertently omitting the last syllable. “You can put your hat and coat in there,” he pointed to a closet, “and then go in the office, there.” He pointed again, and started to return to the kitchen.

  “You must be Tom,” Mr. Yoyogo said. “Mrs. Gilbreth told us all about you. She says you do the cooking, laundry, help with the shopping, and do most of the heavy work in the yard. You must know motion study yourself.”

  Tom turned around. “Let me take your hat and coat,” he said.

  “I’m going to have to watch your motions,” Mr. Yoyogo told him. “You must have what the Gilbreths call The One Best Way.”

  “I’ll learn you what I can, Sir,” said Tom, holding open the office door for him.

  The other six men arrived together in a cab, and again Tom answered the door. They were all in their late twenties or early thirties, and two of them were tall, husky, and handsome.

  “Good night, just look at that,” Ernestine whispered delightedly, forgetting for the moment all about upper New York State. “I’ve already changed my mind about not wanting to be friends. Anne’ll die when she hears what she’s missing.”

  “They’re not what I expected,” Martha admitted. “They don’t seem like the dandruff type.”

  The men were laughing at something, and acted noisy and boyish. They asked Tom how tricks were, and started to take off their coats. Tom took the wraps from the two tall ones, who he apparently had decided must be Americans, and hung them up. But he hesitated before accepting the coats and hats of the other four. When he saw he couldn’t pick out the Englishman, he took the rest of the wraps. Tom always believed in knowing who his friends were, though, so before he departed again for the closet, he asked:

  “Does any of you gentlemen want a cup of tea?”

  Nobody did.

  “How about a crumpet?”

  Nobody wanted one of those either.

  “If you’re looking for the Limey,” one of the two tall ones grinned, and it was apparent that Mother had given all the group a thorough briefing on what to expect, “I’m your man. If you bring my coat back, I’ll hang it up myself.”

  “Never mind,” Tom said grumpily, “this time.”

  There was one more pleasant surprise for us, and Tom seemed to find it pleasant, too. Miss Lies turned out to be young, blonde, slim and stunning. The chef’s hat toppled off as Tom bowed her gallantly into the office.

  We had to hurry away to school, without meeting Mother’s pupils, and got no more than a glimpse of them as they left the house late that afternoon. But the next day Mother said she was going to serve them tea and apple cake, and that if we rushed home from school we could join the party.

  The boys arrived for the tea in their school clothes, but Ernestine and even Martha, who was beginning to use lemon peels on her freckles, put on their best things—dresses with low waists and skirts above the knees, high heels, and rolled silk stockings with clocks down the sides.

  Mother introduced us. “This is Ernestine, my next-to-oldest; and Martha; and Frank, my oldest boy; and Bill.”

  She was interrupted by Tom.

  “If you’ve got time to come back to the kitchen, I’ve got something important to show you, Ma’am,” he told Mother.

  “Can’t it wait until after tea?”

  “Well,” said Tom, looking crushed, “I guess it could. It ain’t nothing much.”

  “It isn’t anything Mr. Chairman has dug up, is it? You know I don’t like to look at those things.”

  “No, Ma’am. It ain’t nothin’ like that.”

  Tom departed, and Mother began to feel sorry for him.

  “It’s probably the cat then,” she said. “I guess I’d better go see it, or he’ll never forgive me.” She got up from the sofa. “If you’ll excuse me …”

  “We’ll go with you, if it’s all right,” Miss Lies said. “I’ve been dying to see what he comes into the office to get you for.”

  “I’m sure Tom wouldn’t mind,” Mother agreed.

  Everybody filed out to the kitchen, and Tom was delighted with the size of his audience.

  “You know how the children is always stepping on Fourteen’s tail by mistake when she’s eating?” Tom asked. “Well, I been putting her milk on top of the ice box and feeding her there.”

  “That makes sense,” Mother agreed doubtfully.

  “I lifted her up there twicet, and then look what I learned her.”

  Tom opened the ice box door and leaned in, as if to get a bottle of milk. The cat, which had been watching him from under a table, jumped onto his back and then to the top of the ice box.

  “Bravo,” shouted Mr. Yoyogo, who thus became a member of Tom’s Club for a thousand years and four days.

  “Smartest cat I ever trained, bar none,” Tom gloated, pouring Fourteen some milk and flicking her whiskers with his forefinger.

  All of us thought it was a good trick, and told him so.

  “Let’s see will he do it for you, Mrs. Gilbreth?” Tom said. He lifted down the c
at. “Just lean in the ice box like you was getting some milk.”

  Mother shivered. “I can’t stand to have anything ticklish on my back—you children know that,” she explained. “Just the thought of it gives me the creeps.”

  Mother’s back was her Achilles heel. Sometimes, to tease her, we’d sneak up behind her and play creep-mouse with our fingers along her backbone. She’d squeal like a little girl, and shudder.

  Finally Mr. Yoyogo agreed to volunteer for the experiment, and Fourteen performed as advertised.

  “Bar none!” Tom repeated. “She’s the smartest.”

  “From now on,” Miss Lies told Tom, “whenever you tell Mrs. Gilbreth to come back here, we’re all coming. I wouldn’t miss anything like this.”

  Miss Lies was in the Club for a thousand years and four days, too.

  After we had returned to the parlor, Mr. Bruce, the handsome American who represented the drug firm, said he wanted to get all of us straight.

  “I know the two biggest girls are Ernestine and Martha,” he said. “Which is Ernestine?”

  “I’m Ernestine,” she told him, sending her eyelashes into a flutter designed to cause boys to leave home.

  “And I’m Martha,” cooed Martha, with a slow, open-lipped smile, also designed to lure striplings from their domiciles.

  “You can tell them apart,” Frank said, “because Martha has the dimpled knees, and Ernestine has the trim little ankles.”

  Mother said that would be sufficient from Frank, and the men replied they had seen nothing deficient in the knees or ankles of either girl. Somehow, though, they seemed more interested in Mother’s apple cake and in the younger children, than in the high-school girls.

  “I’ll bet,” Bill told Mr. Bruce, “that you used to play football when you were a boy.”

  “I used to play some,” Mr. Bruce conceded. “But that was quite a while ago. Before the War. I don’t believe I’ve touched a football since.”

  It developed that all the men had played football or rugby at one time or another, except Mr. Yoyogo, whose game was baseball.

  “You boys don’t happen to have a football, do you?” Mr. Bruce asked. “It might be fun, sometime, to get a little exercise by passing it around.”

  “Sure we do,” Bill said. “We can pass it right now.”

  “Oh, not now,” Mr. Bruce said hastily. “I just meant sometime. We’re having tea now.”

  “Go ahead if you want to,” Mother told him. “Miss Lies and the girls and I will chat. We won’t be going back to work for a half hour or so.”

  “The men don’t want to play games with you boys,” said Ernestine. “Why don’t you stop bothering them?”

  The men didn’t seem to think it was a bother. After asking Mother if she was sure she didn’t mind, they followed the boys out to the side lawn, and picked sides for a game of touch football. All the men played except Mr. Yoyogo, who said he’d have to watch until he learned the rules.

  Tom was cutting the grass up front, and walked over to join the Japanese on the side lines.

  “You don’t like exercise, Mr. Yoyo?” he asked.

  “I like it. But I never played before.”

  “If you like exercise,” said Tom, “I’m going to learn you some motion study about cutting grass.”

  They walked over to the lawn mower, and Tom explained that his method was to cut one row up, and then one row back, and then one row up again.

  “Very ingenious,” Mr. Yoyogo told him, with a straight face. “Now in Japan we never thought of that. We cut one row up, then carry the lawn mower on our shoulders back to where we started, and cut another row up.”

  “There’s a lot of things I can learn you,” Tom assured him. “Why don’t you try it my way, and see how it works?”

  The Japanese, who really did like exercise, started out with the lawn mower. Tom sat down on the grass, to give instruction in case Yoyo should get mixed up and hoist the lawn mower up on his shoulders.

  Mother, Miss Lies, and the girls came out and sat in the hammocks on the side porch, where they could watch the football game. Mother held Jane on her lap, and darned socks. Miss Lies showed Ernestine and Martha a new way to roll up their hair.

  Mr. Bruce called his team back into a huddle and explained that the next play would be a long pass to Bill, in the end zone. The Englishman, who was backing up the line of the opposing team, slapped his squatting lineman on the part of the anatomy that was nearest him, and urged them to fight fiercely. Tom was half asleep, dragging indolently on a cigarette, in the front yard. Mr. Yoyogo, having sheared the front grass to perfection, guided the lawn mower resolutely toward the back yard, where the grass was nearly six inches high.

  MOTHER TOLD US at supper, after her students had gone back to New York for the night, that they had agreed a little exercise period every day would be beneficial.

  “I want to tell you how much I appreciate your being so cooperative,” she said. “I know it’s not easy to have strangers running around the house and yard.”

  “Aw, that’s all right,” Bill said.

  “And I don’t want you girls to think that you have to change your clothes every afternoon, or you boys to think you have to play football with them, if you don’t want to.”

  “Will there be tea tomorrow?” Ernestine asked eagerly.

  “A little after three o’clock,” Mother nodded.

  “We should be able to start the game by 3:30, at the latest,” Frank said.

  10. Efficiency Kitchen

  MOTHER THOUGHT ONE WAY she might get motion study contracts was to apply timesaving methods to the kitchen. Manufacturers would listen to a woman, she believed, when the subject was home appliances.

  If the only way to enter a man’s field was through the kitchen door, that’s the way she’d enter.

  Her students helped her build an electric food mixer, and draw up blueprints for new types of electric stoves and refrigerators. Mother planned, on paper, an efficiency-type kitchenette of the kind used today in a good many apartments. Under her arrangement, a person could mix a cake, put it in the oven, and do the dishes, without taking more than a couple of dozen steps.

  On the strength of her blueprints, she landed a contract with a New York electric concern. The fee was one Dad wouldn’t have considered. But it was the first job Mother had got on her own, and she was proud of it.

  Someone in the electric company told the newspapers about the contract. A woman engineer with eleven children was considered good copy. And in 1924 the idea of a scientifically planned kitchen was news.

  The company arranged a press conference for Mother in New York. The resulting stories, besides telling of Mother’s plans, managed to give the impression that our kitchen in Montclair also was a model of efficiency.

  Actually, the exact opposite was true. Our kitchen, the one Tom used, was a model of inefficiency. Not that there was a handpump over the sink or a spit to roast fowls on, but it was almost that bad.

  Our house had been built when the stress was on spaciousness, and the original owner had planned the kitchen to accommodate three or four servants.

  When Tom baked a cake, or baked what he said was a cake, he had to walk about half a mile.

  The distance from the sink, which was at a back-breaking level, to the old-fashioned gas stove was a good twenty feet. The food was kept in a pantry twenty feet from the stove and forty from the sink. And the dishes were in a butler’s pantry, about the same distance away but in the opposite direction.

  The refrigerator was in an alcove by itself. To get to it, you had to detour around a stand holding the bird cage; around a table holding Tom’s tools, a plumber’s friend, western story magazines, and back copies of The Newark Star-Eagle; and usually around Mr. Chairman, or Fourteen, or both.

  But on the strength of the write-ups about the contract, a newsreel man phoned Mother and said he’d like to bring a crew to Montclair to photograph her in her efficiency kitchen.

  “I’d love t
o have you,” Mother told him, “but you see we haven’t set up the efficiency kitchen yet. All we have are the blueprints.”

  “That’s all right,” the newsreel man said, “we’ll just shoot you in your kitchen there at the house.”

  “I don’t believe that would be exactly suitable,” Mother gulped.

  “The public would never know the difference. They don’t know one efficiency kitchen from another.”

  “They don’t?” Mother stalled.

  “No. And I’m sure that, being an efficiency expert, the kitchen in your home must be pretty much the latest word.”

  “But what we want,” said Mother, “is the very latest word, isn’t it? Not just pretty much.”

  “What we really want, Mrs. Gilbreth, is just some human interest stuff. Nothing scientific. Just you in the kitchen with the children around.”

  “I see,” Mother said brightly, groping desperately for a way out. “Human interest.” She thought of Tom’s kitchen. Now if what they wanted only were animal interest. “We can come out any day this week that’s convenient.”

  “I’m afraid I’m all booked up this week. How about some other time?” Her tone of voice was meant to convey that some other time like the year after next would be just right.

  “We want to get this while the story’s still news. It’ll be fine publicity for your business. And it will only take a few minutes.”

  “All right,” Mother surrendered. “Let’s make it Saturday, then. Say three o’clock Saturday afternoon.”

  The course wasn’t in session on Saturdays and, more important still, Tom would be off duty. Both Dad and Mother had tried in the past to modernize the kitchen, but Tom and his predecessor had been set in their ways. Mother decided that the least said to Tom about the matter, the better.

  She drew up a diagram for our kitchen, and she arranged with a plumber and a gas man to come Saturday to raise the sink and move the stove.

  Tom usually left the house after lunch Saturdays, and returned early Sunday mornings. This time, Mother gave him the whole day off and he departed shortly after breakfast. He was in a gay, holiday mood. He intimated that a large segment of the female population of West Orange, a town bordering on Montclair where Tom spent most of his time off, was going to be in for a pleasant surprise when he made his appearance four hours ahead of schedule.