“Sorry to bother you, Bob, old man,” said McNulty, briskly, “but we thought that you might be able to help us out a little in this scheme for getting the Beau Brummel Steel Handkerchief before the public . . . Sit down, won’t you? . . . Perhaps Mr. Crolish can state his problem better than I can, and then we will get your angle on it.”
Mr. Crolish looked at his papers and cleared his throat. “Well, here is the situation we are faced with,” he began.
“Just a minute, Mr. Crolish,” interrupted McNulty, “I think it might be well, before you begin, to find out from Reemis just what magazines we are going to use, so that Mr. Benchley will have a little better idea of what type of copy we shall need.” And he turned to the telephone. “Get me Mr. Reemis, will you please, Miss Fane?”
Mr. Reemis’s line seemed to be busy, so McNulty propped the receiver up against his ear and reached in the drawer for some cigars, while waiting.
“Another couple of days like this and spring will be here,” he announced tentatively.
“That’s right,” said Mr. Crolish, which didn’t leave much for me to say unless I wanted to fight the statement.
Mr. Reemis was very busy, so McNulty, still holding the receiver, tried something else to pass the time.
“Mrs. McNulty and I saw one of the worst shows I’ve ever seen last night. Rolling Raisins. Did you ever see it?”
I said that I hadn’t and Mr. Crolish said that he hadn’t but that he had heard about it.
“No wonder people don’t go to the theater more,” said McNulty, “when they put . . . oh, hello! . . . Reemis? . . . say, could you step into my office for just a minute, please?”
While we were waiting for Mr. Reemis, McNulty explained the plot of Rolling Raisins. And, as Mr. Reemis was evidently coming into the office by a route which led him down into the street and up the back stairway, Mr. Crolish told the plot of a show which had opened in Detroit last week. I had just started in on the plot of a show we had once put on in college when Mr. Reemis appeared.
“This is Mr. Benchley, Mr. Reemis . . . I guess you know Mr. Crolish. . . . What we wanted to find out was just what magazines we are going to use in this Beau Brummel campaign.”
“Well, there have been some changes made since we went over it with you, Mr. McNulty,” said Mr. Reemis. “I’m not quite sure of the list as it stands. I’ll shoot back to my desk and get it.”
So Mr. Reemis shot back, and Mr. Crolish walked over to the window.
“They certainly are tearing up this old town, aren’t they?” he asked. “Every time I come here there is a new building up somewhere. I suppose they’ll be tearing down the Woolworth Building next.”
“I understand they’ve started already,” said McNulty, “but they don’t quite know where to begin.”
This was a pretty fair line and it got all the laugh that it deserved. The thing was beginning to take on the air of one of those easy-going off-hours which we impractical artists indulge in when we are supposed to be working. It was interrupted by Mr. Reemis “shooting” back with the list.
“Here we are,” he said, brightly. “Now, as I understand it, this is a strictly class appeal we are trying to make and we don’t want to bother with the old-fashioned handkerchief users; so we thought that – ”
Here the door opened and one of the partners came in.
“Sorry to butt in, Harry,” he said, “but have you seen this statement of the Mackbolter people in the Times?”
“I just glanced at it,” said McNulty, ” . . . you know Mr. Benchley, Mr. Wamser? . . . I guess you know Crolish.”
Mr. Wamser and I shook hands.
“Are you any relation to the Benchley who used to live in Worcester?” he asked.
I admitted that I had relatives in Worcester.
“I’ll never forget the night I spent in Worcester once,” he said, seating himself on the edge of McNulty’s desk. “We were motoring to Boston and a thunderstorm came up; so we put in at Worcester – what’s the name of that hotel?”
“The Bancroft?” I suggested.
“I don’t think it was the Bancroft,” he said. “What are some of the others? I’ll know the name if I hear it.”
I said that so far as I knew there weren’t any others since the old Bay State House had been torn down.
“Well, maybe it was the Bancroft.”
Mr. Crolish suggested that it might have been the Worthy.
“The Worthy is in Springfield,” said McNulty.
“Sorry to interrupt,” said one of them, “but do you want the package played up in this Meer-o page or just show the girl playing tennis?”
The two young gentlemen were introduced and turned out to be Mr. Rollik and Mr. MacNordfy.
“Hoagman is handling that more than I am,” said Mr. Wamser. And going to the telephone he asked to have Mr. Hoagman step into Mr. McNulty’s office for a minute. While waiting for Mr. Hoagman, Mr. Rollik asked the gathering (which was, by now, assuming the proportions of a stag smoker) if they had seen what Will Rogers had in the paper that morning.
“I can always get a laugh out of that guy Rogers,” said Mr. Crolish.
“What I like about him is that he gets a lot of common sense into his gags. They mean something.” It was Mr. MacNordfy who thought this.
“Abe Martin is the one I like,” said McNulty. Mr. Wamser was of the opinion that no one had ever been able to touch Mr. Dooley. To prove his point he quoted a fairish bit of one of Mr. Dooley’s dissertations in very bad Irish dialect. Mr. Hoagman, having entered during the recitation, waived the formality of introductions and began:
“If you like Irish jokes, I heard one yesterday that I thought was pretty clever. I may be wrong.”
He was wrong, and so got down to business. “What was it you wanted to see me about?” he asked, as soon as he had stopped laughing.
“The boys here want to know whether the Meer-o people want the package played up in this layout or to subordinate it to the girl playing tennis?”
“Oh, you’ve got to play the package up,” said Mr. Hoagman, thereby making the first business decision of the morning. This gave him such a feeling of duty-done that he evidently decided to knock off work for the rest of the morning and devote his time to story-telling.
The room was so full by this time that I had completely lost sight of Mr. Crolish, who was, at best, a small man and was in his original seat on the other side of the room, still sitting in front of his open brief case. Mr. McNulty was talking on the telephone again and seemed good for fifteen minutes of it. The rest of the staff were milling about, offering each other cigarettes, telling anecdotes and in general carrying on the nation’s business.
I looked at my watch and found that I was already late for a lunch-date; so picking up my hat, I elbowed my way quietly out of the room unnoticed and made the elevator.
Later in the week I heard that McNulty had told someone that I was a nice guy but that there was no sense in trying to do business with me. I guess I shall always be just a dreamer.
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The Dear Dead
Table d’Hôte Days
A Menu from Old Chicago
* * *
I realize as well as anybody that to talk about dieting at this late date is like discussing whether or not the polka causes giddiness or arguing about the merits of the coaster brake on a bicycle. Dieting, as such, is no longer a subject for conversation.
But the whole question has been brought to my mind with a fresh crash by the finding of an old menu among my souvenirs (several of the souvenirs I cannot quite make out – even if I knew what they were, I can see no reason for having saved them), an old menu of a Christmas dinner dispensed to the guests of a famous Chicago hotel in the year 1885. I was not exactly in a position to be eating a dinner like this in 1885, but some of my kind relatives had saved it for my torture in 1930. If you don’t mind, I would like to quote a few of the more poetic passages.
The
dinner was, of course, table d’hôte. When you bought a dinner in those days, you bought a dinner. None of this skimming over the card and saying, “I don’t see anything I want. Just bring me an alligator-pear salad.” If you couldn’t see anything you wanted on one of the old-fashioned table d’hôte menus, you just couldn’t see, that’s all.
This particular menu went out of its way. Even for 1885 it must have represented quite a snack. As I look at it today, I can only stand, hat in hand, and bow my head in reverence for the imagination, as well as the capacity, of that earlier day. Listen:
After the customary blue-points and soup, with a comparatively meager assortment of fish (just a stuffed black bass and boiled salmon), we find a choice of broiled leg of mountain sheep or wild turkey. This is just as a starter. The boys didn’t get down to business until the roast. There are thirty-six choices among the roasts. Among the more distinguished names listed were:
Leg of moose, loin of elk, cinnamon bear, black-tail deer, loin of venison, saddle of antelope (the National Geographic Society evidently did the shopping for meat in behalf of this hotel), opossum, black bear, and then the duck.
The duck will have to have a paragraph all by itself. In fact, we may have to build a small house for it. When this chef came to the duck, he just threw his apron over his head and said: “I’m going crazy, boys – don’t stop me!” He had canvasback duck, wood duck, butterball duck, brant, mallard duck, blue-winged teal, spoonbill duck, sage hen, green-winged teal, and pintail duck, to say nothing of partridge, quail, plover, and some other of the cheap birds.
I am not quite sure what a sage hen is, and I doubt very much if I should have ordered it on that Christmas Day, but somebody thought enough of it to go out and snare two or three just in case, and it seems to me that this is the spirit that has made America what it is today. (And what is that?)
So, after toying with all the members of the duck family except decoys and clay pigeons, the diner of 1885 cast his eye down the card to what were called “Broiled,” a very simple, honest name for what followed. Teal duck (evidently one of the teal ducks from the roast column slipped down into the broiled, and liked it so well that it stayed), ricebirds, marsh birds, sand snipe, reedbirds, blackbirds, and red-winged starling. One wonders why there were no ruby-throated grosbeaks or Baltimore orioles, but probably the dinner was sort of an impromptu affair with guests taking potluck on whatever happened to be in the house.
By this time you would have supposed that they had used up all the birds within a radius of 3,000 miles of Chicago, leaving none to wake people up in the morning. But no. Among the entrées they must have a fillet of pheasant financière, which certainly must have come as a surprise to the dinner parties and tasted good after all that broiled pheasant and roast pheasant. Nothing tastes so good after a broiled pheasant as a good fillet of pheasant financière. And, in case you didn’t want that, there were also cutlets of antelope with mushroom sauce, stewed squirrel with dumplings, and opossum with a nice purée of sweet potatoes. (I suppose you think it is fun to sit here and write these names out, and before lunch at that.)
There then seemed to have come over the chef a feeling that he wasn’t doing quite the right thing by his guests. Oh, it had been all right up to this point, but he hadn’t really shown what he could do. So he got up a team of what he called “ornamental dishes,” and when he said “ornamental” I rather imagine he meant “ornamental.” They probably had to be brought in by the town fire department and eaten standing on a ladder. Playing left end for the “ornamental dishes” we find a pyramid of wild turkey in aspic. Perhaps you would like to stop right there. If you did you would miss the aspic of lobster Queen Victoria, and you couldn’t really be said to have dined unless you had had aspic of lobster Queen Victoria. I rather imagine that it made quite an impressive ornamental dish – that is, if it looked anything like Queen Victoria, who was a very fine-looking woman.
Then, in a little group all by itself (after the pâté of prairie chicken, liver royale, and boned duck à la Bellevue), comes a strange throwback to the old days at the top of the menu, including boned partridge, snipe, duck (how simple just the word “duck” looks after all we have been through), and wild turkey. There seem to have been a lot of the birds who couldn’t find places among the roasts and broils and so just took anything they could get down at the bottom of the card.
It is doubtful if many patrons, by the time they got down to this section, did much with quail or duck again. It is doubtful if they ever wanted to see the names in print again.
Now the question arises – what did people look like after they had eaten a dinner like that? Were people in 1885 so much fatter than those of us today who go around nibbling at bits of pineapple and drinking sips of sauerkraut juice? I personally don’t remember, but it doesn’t seem that people were so much worse off in those days. At any rate, they had a square meal once in a while.
I am not a particularly proud man and it doesn’t make an awful lot of difference to anyone whether I am fat or not. But as I don’t like to run out of breath when I stoop over to tie my shoes, I try to follow the various bits of advice which people give me in the matter of diet. As a result, I get very little to eat, and am cross and hungry most of the time. I feel like a crook every time I take a furtive forkful of potato, and once, after sneaking a piece of hot bread, I was on the verge of giving myself up to the police as a dangerous character.
Now, all this must be a wrong attitude to take toward life. Surely there are more noble aspects (aspect of lobster Queen Victoria, for instance) than that of a man who is afraid to take a piece of bread. I am going to get some photographs of people in 1885 and give quite a lot of study to finding out whether they were very much heavier than people today. If I find that they weren’t, I am going to take that menu of the Chicago Christmas dinner and get some chef, or organization of chefs, to duplicate it.
The worst that can happen to me after eating it will be that I drop dead.
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Mea Culpa
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During the recent furor involving Father-and-Son enlistment in the Army and Navy, my own peculiar position was brought home to me, along with the Herald Tribune and the milk. This position of which I am speaking was not only peculiar; it was embarrassing.
I have a son who is apparently in the Navy. I am obviously not in the Navy, and possibly some explanation is due you taxpayers. A drag on the body-politic I will not be – at least not without stating my case.
In the first place, my son is two inches taller than I am, which makes me look pretty silly, even in civilian clothes. Especially as, for the moment, I have put on weight. Now the best that I could hope to be in the Navy would be a yeoman, because I can’t tie knots, even in the simplest of dress ties. (You will notice that I didn’t say “knots an hour.” I’m not that dumb.) How would I look, a yeoman, saluting my son who is an ensign, two inches taller and quite a lot prettier? Imagination bogs down at the very possibility.
This, frankly, is the main reason why I didn’t join in the Father-and-Son cavalcade. Other reasons follow in order:
1. I am the oldest living white man, especially at seven in the morning.
2. I still think of port-side as “larboard,” because I was brought up on a whaler out of New Bedford (by Mioland).
3. My charge account at Brooks Brothers has been allowed to lapse, at the request of Brooks Brothers. This cuts me out of a uniform, and I see no reason for being in the Navy without a uniform. Do you? Dear?
On the other hand, if there is one, I used to swing a mean oar in a wherry, and was often admired by local trout as I spun under the Boylston Street bridge. I can also box the compass into insensibility. Maybe I am being just a silly sentimentalist in not joining up. Maybe I am just the man the Navy needs. Did you ever think of that? My father was in the Navy when there was no such thing as the Panama Canal, which meant that he had to go all the way around the Horn to get the
morning paper. What am I doing sitting here in my cozy gutter – quibbling? Give me that application blank! And an eraser!
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“One Hundred Years
Ago Today—”
Two Centenaries Which We in America
Must Not Overlook
* * *
During the war there was a horrible type of mind which did nothing, from morning till night, but compute the number of days which had elapsed since the struggle began, and compile tables of “important events in the World Conflict.”
Such specialized intelligences were usually employed in newspaper offices, and found expression in daily columns headed “The 1275th Day of the Great War.” Then would follow a snappy chronology, always beginning with “June 28, 1914 – Murder at Sarajevo of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand.” They never could seem to bring themselves to drop old Francis Ferdinand, probably because he was one of the points of which they were absolutely sure.
And now since the war has ended, these anniversary hounds have been forced to scrape around for more data. Hence the epidemic this year of centenaries of famous persons.
Family life in America must have been at its height during 1818 and 1819, judging from the number of people who are breaking into print now as having been born one hundred years ago. It was the Year of the Great Fecundity, especially in the genius crop. Hardly a day goes by but that we read of the celebration by the Gurble Society of America of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Chester M. Gurble, “the Peoples Poet,” or see a column of selected quotations from the works of Mary Elizabeth Cogeshall Sampter, born just one hundred years ago tomorrow, at Truro, Mass. One cringes to think of the comparatively meager line-up which we, of the present generation of parents, may have to furnish the centenary-celebrators of 2019 as material for a good time.
Chips Off the Old Benchley Page 24