This, according to my theory, is the real history of the characters in our playing cards. They were the most unhappy royal family in any of the old-time chronicles, and somebody thought that it would be a good idea to put them on playing cards just to torture me personally. I don’t know about the early cards, with the duck shooters and anteater stalkers on them. But I venture to say that if I were playing the game, they would all be in the conspiracy, too. For this I have a very simple solution: I stick to Canfield where a man has at least a fighting chance to cheat.
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Yesterday’s
Sweetmeats
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It is a rather dangerous thing to note encouraging tendencies in our national life, for just as soon as someone comes out with a statement that we are better than we used to be, we suddenly prance into another war, or a million people rush out and buy Crude Oil, preferred, or there is an epidemic of mother murders, and we are right back in the neolithic age again with our hair in our eyes.
But in the matter of children’s candy I am afraid that we shall have to come right out and say definitely that the trend is upward. When I look back on the days of my youth and remember the candy that I used to impose on my stomach, the wonder is that I ever grew up to be the fine figure of a man that I am now. The wonder is that I ever grew up at all. Perhaps that was the idea, and I fooled them.
There were two distinct brands of candy in my day: the candy you bought in the drug store on Sunday, when the candy shops were closed, and the week-day, or Colored Corrosion, brand, which, according to all present-day standards of pure food, should have set up a bright green fermentation, with electric lights, in the epiglottises of nine-tenths of the youth of that time.
We can dismiss the Sunday drug-store candy with a word, for it was bought only once a week and then only for lack of something better. Its flavor was not enhanced by the fact that it was kept in tall glass jars, like appendixes, down at the end of the store where the prescriptions were filled, and consequently always had a faint suspicion of spirits of niter and sod. bicarb, about it.
The delicacy called “calves foot,” for instance, which came in long ridged sticks, to be sucked with little or no relish, not only tasted of old French coffee on the second or third brewing, but gave you the undesirable feeling that it was also good for sore throat. The Sunday licorice sticks were larger and more unwieldy, and were definitely bitter on the tongue, besides costing a nickel apiece. Although the rock candy was sweet, it lacked any vestige of imagination in its make-up and made the eating of candy a hollow mockery, and, of course, horehound was frankly medicinal and could be employed only when else had failed.
It was on week days that the real orgy of poisoned and delicious candy took place, a dissipation which was to make a nation of dyspeptics of the present generation of business men and political leaders. This candy was usually bought in a little store run by an old lady (probably an agent in the employ of the German government, in a farsighted scheme to unfit the American people for participation in the war which was to come), and your arrival was heralded by the jangle of a little bell not very cleverly concealed on the top of the door. This was followed by a long period of concentration, the prospective customer sliding his nose along the glass case from end to end, pausing only to ask the price of particularly attractive samples. The smell of those little candy shops is probably now a vanished scent of a bygone day, for it combined not only the aroma of old candies and leather baseballs, but somehow the jangle of the little bell entered into one’s nostrils and titillated two senses at once.
In this collection of tasty morsels the one which haunts my memory most insistenty is a confection called the “wine cup,” a cone-shaped bit of colored sugar filled with some villainous fluid which, when bitten, ran down over the chin and on to the necktie. It was capped by a dingy piece of marshmallow which was supposed to be removed with the teeth before drinking the ambrosia within, but usually at the first nibble the whole structure collapsed, with the result that inveterate “wine-cup” consumers had a telltale coating of sugared water down the front of the coat, and, on a cold day, a slight glaze of ice on the chin. What went on in the stomach no one knows, but it does not make a very pretty picture for the imagination.
Another novelty was an imitation fried egg in a small frying pan, the whole sticky mess to be dug out with a little tin spoon which always bent double at the first application and had to be thrown away. The procedure from then on was to extract the so-called “egg” with the teeth, with the chin jammed firmly into the lower part of the “frying pan” as a fulcrum. This, too, left its mark on the habitué, the smear sometimes extending as high up as the forehead if the nose was very small, as it usually was.
There was one invention which was fortunately short-lived, for even in those days of killers’ candy it was a little too horrible for extended consumption. It consisted of two cubes (the forerunner of our bouillon cubes of today) which, on being placed each in a glass of water mixed with a soda-fountain technique, proceeded to effervesce with an ominous activity and form what was known either as “root beer,” “ginger ale,” or “strawberry soda,” according to the color of the cubes.
The excitement of mixing them was hardly worth the distinct feeling of suicide which accompanied the drinking of the result, for God knows what they were or what the chemical formula for the precipitate could have been. Probably something which could have gone into the manufacture of a good, stable house paint or even guncotton.
The little mottoes, in the shape of tiny hearts, which carried such varied sentiments as “I Love You,” “Skiddoo,” “Kick Me,” and “Kiss Me Quick,” were probably harmless enough in their make-up, although I would always mistrust anything colored pink, but transporting them from shop to school and around the town loose in the pocket soon rendered them grimy and covered with gnirs (a “gnir” is a little particle of wool found in the bottom of pockets, especially constructed for adhering to candies) and unfit for anything involving an aesthetic sense.
“Chocolate babies” also made poor pocket candies, especially when in contact with “jelly beans.” (The “jelly bean” seems to have survived down the ages and still is served in little bean pots from the original stock in the store. It would be interesting to discover why.) Licorice whips and “all-day suckers” (which changed color and design on being held in the mouth, a fact which seemed miraculous at the time, but which, on contemplation, sends a slight shudder down the middle-aged spine) were probably the safest of all early twentieth-century candies, but even they would probably fail miserably to pass the test of the Bureau of Standards in Washington.
Worst of all was the “prize package,” a cone of old newspaper containing the odds and ends of the day’s refuse – hard marshmallows with enough thumbprints on them to convict the candy dealer ten times over, quantities of tired pop corn which had originally been pink, strange little oddments of green and red sugar which, even in their heyday, could not have been much, and, as the Prize, either a little piece of tin in the approximate shape of a horse or a button reading “Bust the Trusts.” My gambling instinct made these “prize packages” a great favorite for my pennies, and it is to these and to old Mrs. Hill, who ran the candy shop and dispensed her largesse in this great-hearted manner, that I lay present inability to eat eggs which have been boiled for more than eight seconds. Dear, dear Mrs. Hill!
And so, regardless of the present generation’s freedom and reputed wildness, I will take a chance on their stomachs being in better shape at forty than mine is, for bootleg alcohol, whatever its drawbacks, takes away that craving for sweets which was the ruin of my generation.
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More Work Ahead
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And now, with all this work that I have on my hands, along comes the Hoover Dam. I said to them when they came to me: “You’ll have to get somebody else to build it. I’ve got work enough ahead
now to keep me busy until September.” But no. They must have me. So here I am – stuck with the job. And the funny part of it is, I never built a dam in my life.
I think what I will do is this: I will draw up all the plans and get things into running order and then I will turn the whole thing over to one of my lieutenants and say: “Lieutenant, here is one of the biggest jobs a man could ask for bigger, in fact. I have laid everything out for you – here are the blue prints, here are the maps of the Colorado (the dam is to be on the Colorado, isn’t it?), and you will find the sugar and coffee on the top shelf in the kitchen closet. Now go to it, boy, and make a name for yourself!” Then I will go back to bed.
Now we come to laying out the plans. The building of the Hoover Dam is no dilettante job. We have all got to keep sober – except, of course, Saturdays and Sundays. We can’t have any kidding around the shop or any practical jokes, like joshing up the blue prints with “X marks the spot” and “Eddie loves Mabel.” Those blue prints have got to tell a story, and they have got to tell it right. Otherwise the valley of the Colorado River will wake up some morning and find itself full of bluefish and old rowboats. Each and every one of us on the job has got to work like the very devil and just make this the best dam that has ever been built. I don’t have to tell you boys that.
The first thing to do, as I see it, is to find the river. I know in a general way where it is, having stopped off for a day on the way to Hollywood to look at the Grand Canyon. (Don’t tell me at this late date that that Colorado River isn’t the one we’re working on. That would discourage me.) As I remember it, it looked pretty big. Almost too big. Thinking back on what I saw that day, I have almost a mind to give the whole thing up. . . . Oh, well, the hell with it! Let’s take a chance, anyway.
Now, once we decide on which river it is we are going to dam, the next thing to do is to decide how we are going to dam it. According to the specifications which have been turned over to me by the government the dam must be 730 feet high (I think that we can get away with 700 feet, which is a round number and easier to remember) and 1,100 feet long. That is pretty long. It is the longest dam you ever saw and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the longest dam that Hoover ever saw, engineer that he is. The canal (this is the first I have heard about a canal, by the way. I thought we were just building a dam) – the canal has got to be 200 miles long and big enough to float a ship drawing twenty feet of water. 1 am sorry to have to intrude all these technical details, but, after all, we are embarked on a fairly technical venture. You can’t go at this thing as you would at making a punch or a costume for a fancy dress ball. We have got to know something about what we are going to do. Otherwise people will laugh.
You see, we plan to spend about $100,000,000 on the thing. This is the figure which the government has given me, but I plan on slipping a little bit more over because of the fact that we shall all have to have our lunches out there on the job and will naturally be expected to use taxis to get to and from work. I should think that a concern as big as the United States government would want its employees to be well nourished and travel in some sort of style, if only for appearances’ sake. So we’ll call it $100,000,750. If they don’t like it, they can protest it and we’ll settle for the taxi fare. I, for one, do not intend to live right by the construction work. There must be a good hotel somewhere up back in the hills. If there isn’t, we’ll build one.
Now. Here we are, all set to begin. We have $100,000,000 to spend (with extras), a pretty fair-sized river to dam, and a lot of mending to be done. O.K. Let’s go!
I frankly haven’t the slightest idea of what to do first. (Don’t let this get around!) My first idea would be to throw a lot of stuff into the river at the point where the dam is to be until it all fills up and we can go home. This is not as easy as it sounds. To begin with, we have got to get stuff to throw in which will not melt or filter through. This eliminates mud and corn husks. Mud is all right for a small dam, such as the ones we have built before, but this time we have got to allow for erosion, adhesion, collusion, and depreciation. All of which have to be divided by seven and taken the square root of. So we can’t use mud; or, if we do, we have got to be careful and not call it mud in the expense account. When you are spending $100,000,000 you can’t have an item like “Mud . . . $5,000,000.” Congress would get suspicious.
All right, then. . . . The only thing left for us to do, that I can see, is to throw in a lot of concrete. And here is where our first big problem presents itself. How do we get the concrete into such a form that we can throw it into the river so that it will stay? This, I admit, is a poser. We have simply got to mix the concrete up on the bank and throw it in great blocks where we want it. But how are we to get the blocks in the middle of the stream? The ends are all right. We can do that in no time. But that middle? I don’t like to be defeatist, but I doubt very much if it can be done at all.
If we go on this theory, viz., that it can’t be done at all, we are adopting the Lazy Man’s attitude. What would have happened if Fulton had said: “I can’t invent the steam engine?” What would have happened if Edison had said: “I can’t beat Ford and Firestone at throwing horseshoes?” The work of this world has been done by men who said: “I can’t” – and who meant it.
So now that we have got that old Colorado River just chock full of concrete blocks right where it needs it most, we must look around for some place to sit down and rest. And, unless I am very much mistaken, this is going to be our toughest job. You can’t stand on the bank, as we shall have been doing, mixing concrete blocks and tossing them into a river, without making a frightful mess on the shores, what with donkey engines, concrete mixers, lemon peels, and White Rock bottles. What we shall have to do is to put in a requisition, or petty-cash voucher, for a man to pick all these things up and cart them away, so that we can sit down and rest when we have finally got the dam built.
We don’t want to go back to the hotel right away, because something might happen. The dam might burst and you know what that means. Ask the people of Johnstown. They are still sore about it.
The government said nothing about it in the prospectus it sent to me, but I understand from friends that the district in which the dam is to be built gets pretty hot in summer. I have heard 120 in the shade quoted. They always add: “But, of course, it is that clear, dry heat – so you don’t mind it.” But I have heard that before. Natives are always telling you that the heat in their home town is clear and dry and that one doesn’t notice it, but I have never been able to catch it on one of its clear, dry days.
My theory is that when it is 120 in the shade it is 120 in the shade, and I have pretty good scientific backing for my point. And 120 in the shade is too hot for work, wet or dry.
So, as far as I am concerned, things look pretty black for ever getting the Hoover Dam finished. We have, in this little summary, found that it is too big, too difficult, and too hot. That leaves practically nothing in its favor except that it might possibly be fun to tinker around with, which, you will admit, is nothing to sink $100,000,000 in.
My advice to the government (in sending in my resignation herewith) would be to drop the whole business before it is too late and stick to seeds.
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Atom Boy!
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With all that I have to do, it seems a little too bad that I should have to keep worrying about the constitution of the atom. One day Sir Arthur Reeves Reeves-Arthur comes out and says that the atom is made up of electrons and protons. The following week Dr. Hjalmar Rensnessen reads a paper before the Royal Society of Locomotive Engineers and says that the atom is composed of little pieces of old pocket lint. The hell with both of them! I can’t be bothered.
There is one feature of these researches, however, which holds my attention for almost a quarter of a second. Someone (his name slips my mind right now, but I have it in my files in case you ever should want it) has figured out that, if we could utilize the energy in
an atom, we would never have to do any more work ourselves. Now, there’s a scientist! There’s the boy for me! He doesn’t say what we are going to nibble on when we go out to the ice box to get a cold snack before going to bed, or what strange medium of exchange we are going to use to buy it with, since none of us are working, but he does say that we won’t be working, and that is the main thing. The eating will take care of itself. We can eat each other. And I already have a list of twenty people whom I don’t want to eat.
As I understand it (which I don’t), each atom has a so-called “nucleus” as its center, like that cute little old Daddy Worm in the center of a chestnut. This part I have decided not to think about.
But when you consider that each atom is only a hundred-millionths of an inch across (that would be even smaller than the piece of lobster in a lobster and shrimp Newburgh) and that its nucleus is only about ten-thousandths of this diameter, you will not only see how small a nucleus is but you will also go a little crazy. In fact, in just writing these figures down on paper I have whipped myself into such a state that I have got the typewriter ribbon all tangled up in my fingers and am going to have to drop everything and bathe my temples.
So what?
So if we can split an atom (I am using the slang of Prof. E. N. daC. Andrade in the London Observer) and then can split the nucleus, we are going to find a lot of little things called “protons” and “electrons,” and you can imagine how small they are going to be. It is absurd. The protons are positive and the electrons are negative, and, of the two, I am sure that the electrons are nicer. I hate a positive proton. They think they know everything. It is “This is so” and “That is so,” until you want to smack them in the face. With the world in the state it is in today, nobody can be as positive as all that.
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