SHIPOWNERS DEMAND PROTECTION

Yankee doodle that melodee
Yankee doodle that melodee
Makers me stand right tip and cheer

only survivors of crew of schooner Onato are put in jail
on arrival in Philadelphia

PRESIDENT STRONGER WORKS IN SICKROOM

I'm coming U.S.A.
I'll say

MAY GAG PRESS

There's no land . . . so grand

Charles M. Schwab, who has returned from Europe, was
a luncheon guest at the White House. He stated that this
country was prosperous but not so prosperous as it should be,
because there were so many disturbing investigations on foot

. . . as my land
From California to Manhattan Isle

CHARLEY ANDERSON

The ratfaced bellboy put down the bags, tried the fau-
cets of the washbowl, opened the window a little, put the
key on the inside of the door and then stood at something
like attention and said, "Anything else, lootenant?" This
is the life, thought Charley, and fished a quarter out of his
pocket. "Thank you, Sir, lootenant." The bellboy shuffled
his feet and cleared his throat. "It must have been terrible
overseas, lootenant." Charley laughed. "Oh, it was all
right.""I wish I coulda gone, lootenant." The boy showed

-11-

a couple of ratteeth in a grain. "It must be wonderfull to be
a hero," he said and backed out the door.

Charley stood looking out the window as he unbuttoned
his tunic. He was high up. Through a street of grimy
square buildings he could see some columns and the roofs
of the new Penn station and beyond, across the trainyards,
a blurred sun setting behind high ground the other side of
the Hudson. Overhead was purple and pink. An el train
clattered raspingly through the empty Sundayevening
streets. The wind that streamed through the bottom of the
window had a gritty smell of coalashes. Charley put the
window down and went to wash his face and hands. The
hotel towel felt soft and thick with a little whiff of chlo-
ride. He went to the lookingglass and combed his hair.
Now what?

He was walking up and down the room fidgeting with
a cigarette, watching the sky go dark outside the window,
when the jangle of the phone startled him. It was Ollie
Taylor's polite fuddled voice. "I thought maybe you
wouldn't know where to get a drink. Do you want to come
around to the club?""Gee, that's nice of you, Ollie. I was
jusy wonderin' what a feller could do with himself in this
man's town.""You know it's quite dreadful here," Ollie's
voice went on. "Prohibition and all that, it's worse than
the wildest imagination could conceive. I'll come and pick
you up with a cab.""All right, Ollie, I'll be in the lobby."

Charley put on his tunic, remembered to leave off his
Sam Browne belt, straightened his scrubby sandy hair
again, and went down into the lobby. He sat down in a
deep chair facing the revolving doors.

The lobby was crowded. There was music coming from
somewhere in back. He sat there listening to the dance-
tunes, looking at the silk stockings and the high heels and
the furcoats and the pretty girls' faces pinched a little by
the wind as they came in off the street. There was an ex-
pensive jingle and crinkle to everything. Gosh, it was

-12-

great. The girls left little trails of perfume and a warm
smell of furs as they passed him. He started counting up
how much jack he had. He had a draft for three hundred
bucks he'd saved out of his pay, four yellowbacked twenties
in the wallet in his inside pocket he'd won at poker on the
boat, a couple of tens, and let's see how much change. The
coins made a little jingle in his pants as he fingered them
over.

Ollie Taylor's red face was nodding at Charley above a
big camelshair coat. "My dear boy, New York's a wreck.
. . . They are pouring icecream sodas in the Knicker-
bocker bar. . . ." When they got into the cab together he
blew a reek of highgrade rye whiskey in Charley's face.
" Charley, I've promised to take you along to dinner with
me. . . . Just up to ole Nat Benton's. You won't mind
. . . he's a good scout. The ladies want to see a real flying
aviator with palms.""You're sure I won't be buttin' in,
Ollie?""My dear boy, say no more about it."

At the club everybody seemed to know Ollie Taylor.
He and Charley stood a long time drinking Manhattans at
a darkpaneled bar in a group of whitehaired old gents
with a barroom tan on their faces. It was Major this and
Major that and Lieutenant every time anybody spoke to
Charley. Charley was getting to be afraid Ollie would get
too much of a load on to go to dinner at anybody's house.

At last it turned out to be seventhirty, and leaving the
final round of cocktails, they got into a cab again, each of
them munching a clove, and started uptown. "I don't
know what to say to 'em," Ollie said. "I tell them I've just
spent the most delightful two years of my life, and they
make funny mouths at me, but I can't help it."

There was a terrible lot of marble, and doormen in
green, at the apartmenthouse where they went out to din-
ner and the elevator was inlaid in different kinds of wood.
Nat Benton, Ollie whispered while they were waiting for
the door to open, was a Wall Street broker.

-13-

They were all in eveningdress waiting for them for
dinner in a pinkishcolored drawingroom. They were evi-
dently old friends of Ollie's because they made a great
fuss over him and they were very cordial to Charley and
brought out cocktails right away, and Charley felt like the
cock of the walk.

There was a girl named Miss Humphries who was as
pretty as a picture. The minute Charley set eyes on her
Charley decided that was who he was going to talk to.
Her eyes and her fluffy palegreen dress and the powder in
the little hollow between her shoulderblades made him
feel a little dizzy so that he didn't dare stand too close to
her. Ollie saw the two of them together and came up and
pinched her ear. "Doris, you've grown up to be a raving
beauty." He stood beaming teetering a little on his short
legs. "Hum . . . only the brave deserve the fair. . . .
It's not every day we come home from the wars, is it,
Charley me boy?"

"Isn't he a darling?" she said when Ollie turned away.
"We used to be great sweethearts when I was about six
and he was a collegeboy." When they were all ready to go
into dinner Ollie, who'd had a couple more cocktails,
spread out his arms and made a speech. "Look at them,
lovely, intelligent, lively American women. . . . There
was nothing like that on the other side, was there, Char-
ley? Three things you can't get anywhere else in the
world, a good cocktail, a decent breakfast, and an American
girl, God bless 'em.""Oh, he's such a darling," whispered
Miss Humphries in Charley's ear.

There was silverware in rows and rows on the table and
a Chinese bowl with roses in the middle of it, and a group
of giltstemmed wineglasses at each place. Charley was re-
lieved when he found he was sitting next to Miss Hum-
phries. She was smiling up at him. "Gosh," he said, grin-
ning into her face, "I hardly know how to act." "It must

-14-

be a change . . . from over there. But just act natural.
That's what I do."

"Oh, no, a feller always gets into trouble when he acts
natural."

She laughed. "Maybe you're right. . . . Oh, do tell me
what it was really like over there. . . . Nobody'll ever
tell me everything." She pointed to the palms on his Croix
de Guerre. "Oh, Lieutenant Anderson, you must tell me
about those."

They had white wine with the fish and red wine with
the roastbeef and a dessert all full of whippedcream.
Charley kept telling himself he mustn't drink too much so
that he'd be sure to behave right.

Miss Humphries' first name was Doris. Mrs. Benton
called her that. She'd spent a year in a convent in Paris
before the war and asked him about places she'd known,
the church of the Madeleine and Rumpelmayers and the
pastryshop opposite the Comédie Française. After dinner
she and Charley took their coffeecups into a windowbay
behind a big pink begonia in a brass pot and she asked him
if he didn't think New York was awful. She sat on the
windowseat and he stood over her looking past her white
shoulder through the window down at the traffic in the
street below. It had come on to rain and the lights of the
cars made long rippling streaks on the black pavement of
Park Avenue. He said something about how he thought
home would look pretty good to him all the same. He was
wondering if it would be all right if he told her she had
beautiful shoulders. He'd just about gotten around to it
when he heard Ollie Taylor getting everybody together
to go out to a cabaret. "I know it's a chore," Ollie was
saying, "but you children must remember it's my first
night in New York and humor my weakness."

They stood in a group under the marquee while the
doorman called taxicabs. Doris Humphries in her long
eveningwrap with fur at the bottom of it stood so close to

-15-

Charley her shoulder touched his arm. In the lashing
rainy wind off the street he could smell the warm perfume
she wore and her furs and her hair. They stood back while
the older people got into the cabs. For a second her hand
was in his, very little and cool as he helped her into the
cab. He handed out a half a dollar to the doorman who
had whispered " Shanley's" to the taxidriver in a serious
careful flunkey's voice.

The taxi was purring smoothly downtown between the
tall square buildings. Charley was a little dizzy. He didn't
dare look at her for a moment but looked out at faces, cars,
trafficcops, people in raincoats and umbrellas passing
against drugstore windows.

"Now tell me how you got the palms."

"Oh, the frogs just threw those in now and then to keep
the boys cheerful."

"How many Huns did you bring down?"

"Why bring that up?"

She stamped her foot on the floor of the taxi. "Oh, no-
body'll ever tell me anything. . . . I don't believe you
were ever at the front, any of you." Charley laughed. His
throat was a little dry. "Well, I was over it a couple of
times."

Suddenly she turned to him. There were flecks of light
in her eyes in the dark of the cab. "Oh, I understand. . . .
Lieutenant Anderson, I think you flyers are the finest
people there are.""Miss Humphries, I think you're a
. . . humdinger. . . . I hope this taxi never gets to this
dump . . . wherever it is we're goin'." She leaned her
shoulder against his for a second. He found he was holding
her hand. "After all, my name is Doris," she said in a tiny
babytalk voice.

"Doris," he said. "Mine's Charley."

" Charley, do you like to dance?" she asked in the same
tiny voice. "Sure," Charley said, giving her hand a quick

-16-

squeeze. Her voice melted like a little tiny piece of candy.
"Me too. . . . Oh, so much."

When they went in the orchestra was playing Darda-
nella. Charley left his trenchcoat and his hat in the check-
room. The headwaiter's heavy grizzled eyebrows bowed
over a white shirtfront. Charley was following Doris's
slender back, the hollow between the shoulderblades where
his hand would like to be, across the red carpet, between
the white tables, the men's starched shirts, the women's
shoulders, through the sizzly smell of champagne and
welshrabbit and hot chafingdishes, across a corner of the
dancefloor among the swaying couples to the round white
table where the rest of them were already settled. The
knives and forks shone among the stiff creases of the fresh
tablecloth.

Mrs. Benton was pulling off her white kid gloves look-
ing at Ollie Taylor's purple face as he told a funny story.
"Let's dance," Charley whispered to Doris. "Let's dance
all the time."

Charley was scared of dancing too tough so he held her
a little away from him. She had a way of dancing with her
eyes closed. "Gee, Doris, you are a wonderful dancer."
When the music stopped the tables and the cigarsmoke and
the people went on reeling a little round their heads. Doris
was looking up at him out of the corners of her eyes. "I
bet you miss the French girls, Charley. How did you like
the way the French girls danced, Charley?"

"Terrible."

At the table they were drinking champagne out of
breakfast coffeecups. Ollie had had two bottles sent up
from the club by a messenger. When the music Started
again Charley had to dance with Mrs. Benton, and then
with the other lady, the one with the diamonds and the
spare tire round her waist. He and Doris only had two
more dances together. Charley could see the others wanted
to go home because Ollie was getting too tight. He had a

-17-

flask of rye on his hip and a couple of times had beckoned
Charley out to have a swig in the cloakroom with him.
Charley tongued the bottle each time because he was hop-
ing he'd get a chance to take Doris home.

When they got outside it turned out she lived in the
same block as the Bentons did; Charley cruised around on
the outside of the group while the ladies were getting their
wraps on before going out to the taxicab, but he couldn't
get a look from her. It was just, "Goodnight, Ollie dear,
goodnight, Lieutenant Anderson," and the doorman slam-
ming the taxi door. He hardly knew which of the hands
he had shaken had been hers.

NEWSREEL XLV

'Twarn't for powder and for storebought hair
De man I love would not gone nowhere

if one should seek a simple explanation of his career it
would doubtless be found in that extraordinary decision to for-
sake the ease of a clerkship for the wearying labor of a section
hand. The youth who so early in life had so much of judgment
and willpower could not fail to rise above the general run of
men. He became the intimate of bankers

St. Louis woman wid her diamon' rings
Pulls dat man aroun' by her apron strings

Tired of walking, riding a bicycle or riding in streetcars,
he is likely to buy a Ford.

DAYLIGHT HOLDUP SCATTERS CROWD

Just as soon as his wife discovers that every Ford is like
every other Ford and that nearly everyone has one, she is likely
to influence him to step into the next social group, of which
the Dodge is the most conspicuous example.

-18-

The next step comes when daughter comes back from col-
lege and the family moves into a new home. Father wants
economy. Mother craves opportunity for her children, daugh-
ter desires social prestige and son wants travel, speed, get-up-
and-go.

MAN SLAIN NEAR HOTEL MAJESTIC BY
THREE FOOTPADS

I hate to see de evenin sun go down.
Hate to see de evenin sun go down
Cause my baby he done lef' dis town

such exploits may indicate a dangerous degree of bravado
but they display the qualities that made a boy of high school
age the acknowledged leader of a gang that has been a thorn
in the side of the State of

THE AMERICAN PLAN

Frederick Winslow Taylor (they called him
Speedy Taylor in the shop) was born in Germantown,
Pennsylvania, the year of Buchanan's election. His
father was a lawyer, his mother came from a family of
New Bedford whalers; she was a great reader of Emer-
son, belonged to the Unitarian Church and the Brown-
ing Society. She was a fervent abolitionist and believed
in democratic manners; she was a housekeeper of the
old school, kept everybody busy from dawn till dark.
She laid down the rules of conduct:

self respect, selfreliance, selfcontrol
and a cold long head for figures.

But she wanted her children to appreciate the finer
things so she' took them abroad for three years on the

-19-

Continent, showed them cathedrals, grand opera, Ro-
man pediments, the old masters under their brown
varnish in their great frames of tarnished gilt.

'Later Fred Taylor was impatient of these wasted
years, stamped out of the room when people talked
about the finer things; he was a testy youngster, fond
of practical jokes and a great hand at rigging up con-
traptions and devices.

At Exeter he was head of his class and captain of
the ballteam, the first man to pitch overhand. (When
umpires complained that overhand pitching wasn't in
the rules of the game, he answered that it got results.)

As a boy he had nightmares, going to bed was
horrible for him; he thought they came from sleeping
on his back. He made himself a leather harness with
wooden pegs that stuck into his flesh when he turned
over. When he was grown he slept in a chair or in bed
in a sitting position propped up with pillows. All his
life he suffered from sleeplessness.

He was a crackerjack tennisplayer. In 1881, with
his friend Clark, he won the National Doubles Cham-
pionship. (He used a spoonshaped racket of his own
design.)

At school he broke down from overwork, his eyes
went back on him. The doctor suggested manual labor.
So instead of going to Harvard he went into the
machineshop of a small pumpmanufacturing concern,
owned by a friend of the family's, to learn the trade
of patternmaker and machinist. He learned to handle
a lathe and to dress and cuss like a workingman.

Fred Taylor never smoked tobacco or drank
liquor or used tea or coffee; he couldn't understand
why his fellowmechanics wanted to go on sprees and
get drunk and raise Cain Saturday nights. He lived at

-20-

home, when he wasn't reading technical books he'd
play parts in amateur theatricals or step up to the piano
in the evening and sing a good tenor in A Warrior
Bold or A Spanish Cavalier.

He served his first year's apprenticeship in the
machineshop without pay; the next two years he made
a dollar and a half a week, the last year two dollars.

Pennsylvania was getting rich off iron and coal.
When he was twentytwo, Fred Taylor went to work at
the Midvale Iron Works. At first he had to take a
clerical job, but he hated that and went to work with
a shovel. At last he got them to put him on a lathe.
He was a good machinist, he worked ten hours a day
and in the evenings followed an engineering course at
Stevens. In six years he rose from machinist's helper to
keeper of toolcribs to gangboss to foreman to master-
mechanic in charge of repairs to chief draftsman and
director of research to chief engineer of the Midvale
Plant.

The early years he was a machinist with the other
machinists in the shop, cussed and joked and worked
with the rest of them, soldiered on the job when they
did. Mustn't give the boss more than his money's
worth. But when he got to be foreman he was on the
management's side of the fence, gathering in on the
part of those on the management's side all' the great
mass of traditional knowledge which in the past has
been in the heads of the workmen and in the physical
skill and knack of the workman. He couldn't stand to
see an idle lathe or an idle man.

Production went to his head and thrilled his sleep-
less nerves like liquor or women on a Saturday night.

-21-

He never loafed and he'd be damned if anybody else
would. Production was an itch under his skin.

He lost his friends in the shop; they called him
niggerdriver. He was a stockily built man with a tem-
per and a short tongue.

I was a young man in years but I give you my
word I was a great deal older than I am now, what
with the worry, meanness and contemptibleness of the
whole damn thing. It's a horrid life for any man to
live not being able to look any workman in the face
without seeing hostility there, and a feeling that every
man around you is your virtual enemy.

That was the beginning of the Taylor System of
Scientific Management.

He was impatient of explanations, he didn't care
whose hide he took off in enforcing the laws he believed
inherent in the industrial process.

When starting an experiment in any field question
everything, question the very foundations upon which
the art rests, question the simplest, the most selfevident,
the most universally accepted facts; prove everything,

except the dominant Quaker Yankee (the New
Bedfordskippers were the greatest niggerdrivers on
the whaling seas) rules of conduct. He boasted he'd
never ask a workman to do anything he couldn't do.

He devised an improved steamhammer; he stand-
ardized tools and equipment, he filled the shop with
college students with stopwatches and diagrams, tabu-
lating, standardizing. There's the right way of doing a
thing and the' wrong way of doing it; the right way
means increased production, lower costs, higher wages,
bigger profits: the American plan.

He broke up the foreman's job into separate func-

-22-

tions, speedbosses, gangbosses, timestudy men, orderof-
work men.

The skilled mechanics were too stubborn for him,
what he wanted was a plain handyman who'd do what
he was told. If he was a firstclass man and did firstclass
work Taylor was willing to let him have firstclass pay;
that's where he began to get into trouble with the
owners.

At thirtyfour he married and left Midvale and
took a flyer for the big money in connection with a
pulpmill started in Maine by some admirals and po-
litical friends of Grover Cleveland's;

the panic of '93 made hash of that enterprise,
so Taylor invented for himself the job of Con-
sulting Engineer in Management and began to build
up a fortune by careful investments.

The first paper he read before the American So-
ciety of Mechanical Engineers was anything but a suc-
cess, they said he was crazy. I have found, he wrote in
1909, that any improvement is not only opposed but
aggressively and bitterly opposed by the majority of
men.

He was called in by Bethlehem Steel. It was in
Bethlehem he made his famous experiments with han-
dling pigiron; he taught a Dutchman named Schmidt
to handle fortyseven tons instead of twelve and a half
tons of pigiron a day and got Schmidt to admit he
was as good as ever at the end of the day.

He was a crank about shovels, every job had to
have a shovel of the right weight and size for that job
alone; every job had to have a man of the right weight
and size for that job alone; but when he began to pay
his men in proportion to the increased efficiency of their
work,

-23-

the owners who were a lot of greedy smalleyed
Dutchmen began to raise Hail Columbia; when Schwab
bought Bethlehem Steel in 1901

Fred Taylor
inventor of efficiency

who had doubled the production of the stamping-
mill by speeding up the main lines of shafting from
ninetysix to twohundred and twentyfive revolutions a
minute
was unceremoniously fired.

After that Fred Taylor always said he couldn't af-
ford to work for money.

He took to playing golf (using golfclubs of his
own design), doping out methods for transplanting
huge boxtrees into the garden of his home.

At Boxly in Germantown he kept open house for
engineers, factorymanagers, industrialists;

he wrote papers,
lectured in colleges,
appeared before a congressional committee,

everywhere preached the virtues of scientific man-
agement and the Barth slide rule, the cutting down of
waste and idleness, the substitution for skilled mechanics
of the plain handyman (like Schmidt the pigiron
handler) who'd move as he was told

and work by the piece:
production;

more steel rails more bicycles more spools of
thread more armorplate for battleships more bedpans
more barbedwire more needles more lightningrods
more ballbearings more dollarbills;

(the old Quaker families of Germantown were
growing rich, the Pennsylvania millionaires were breed-
ing billionaires out of iron and coal)

-24-

production would make every firstclass American
rich who was willing to work at piecework and not
drink or raise' Cain or think or stand mooning at his
lathe.

Thrifty Schmidt the pigiron handler can invest his
money and get to be an owner like Schwab and the rest
of the greedy smalleyed Dutchmen and cultivate a
taste for Bach and have hundred gyearold boxtrees in his
garden at Bethlehem or Germantown or Chestnut Hill,
and lay down the rules of conduct;
the American plan.

But Fred Taylor never saw the working of the
American plan;

in 1915 he went to the hospital in Philadelphia
suffering from a breakdown.

Pneumonia developed; the nightnurse heard him
winding his watch;

on the morning of his fiftyninth birthday, when
the nurse went into his room to look at him at four-
thirty,

he was dead with his watch in his hand.

NEWSREEL XLVI

these are the men for whom the rabid lawless, anarchistic
element of society in this country has been laboring ever since
sentence was imposed, and of late they have been augmented
by many good lawabiding citizens who have been misled by the
subtle arguments of those propagandists

The times are hard and the wages low
Leave her Johnny leave her
The bread is hard and the beef is salt
It's time for us to leave her

-25-

BANKERS HAIL ERA OF EXPANSION
PROSPERITY FOR ALL SEEN ASSURED

Find German Love of Caviar a Danger to Stable Money

EX-SERVICE MEN DEMAND JOBS

No one knows
No one cares if I'm weary
Oh how soon they forgot Chhteau-Thierry

WE FEEL VERY FRIENDLY TOWARDS THE
TYPEWRITER USERS OF NEW YORK CITY

JOBLESS RIOT AT AGENCY

Ships in de oceans
Rocks in de sea
Blond-headed woman
Made a fool outa me

THE CAMERA EYE (43)

throat tightens when the redstacked steamer churn-
ing the faintlyheaving slatecolored swell swerves shaking
in a long greenmarbled curve past the red lightship

spine stiffens with the remembered chill of the off-
shore Atlantic

and the jag of framehouses in the west above the
invisible land and spiderweb rollercoasters and the chew-
inggum towers of Coney and the freighters with their
stacks way aft and the blur beyond Sandy Hook

and the smell of saltmarshes warmclammysweet

-26-

remembered bays silvery inlets barred with trestles
the put put before day of a gasolineboat way up the
creek

raked masts of bugeyes against straight tall pines on
the shellwhite beach

the limeycold reek of an oysterboat in winter

and creak of rockers on the porch of the scrollsaw cot-
tage and uncles' voices pokerface stories told sideways out
of the big mouth (from Missouri who took no rubber
nickels) the redskin in the buffalorobe selling snakeroot in
the flare of oratorical redfire the sulphury choke and the
hookandladder clanging down the redbrick street while the
clinging firemen with uncles' faces pull on their rubbercoats

and the crunch of whitecorn muffins and coffee with
cream gulped in a hurry before traintime and apartment-
house mornings stifling with newspapers and the smooth
powdery feel of new greenbacks and the whack of a cop's
billy cracking a citizen's skull and the faces blurred with
newsprint of men in jail

the whine and shriek of the buzzsaw and the tipsy
smell of raw lumber and straggling through slagheaps
through fireweed through wasted woodlands the shanty-
towns the shantytowns

what good burying those years in the old graveyard
by the brokendown brick church that morning in the spring

-27-

when the sandy lanes were streaked with blue puddles and
the air was violets and pineneedles

what good burying those hated years in the latrine-
stench at Brocourt under the starshells

if today the crookedfaced customsinspector with the
soft tough talk the burring speech the funnypaper antics of
thick hands jerking thumb

(So you brought home French books didjer?)
is my uncle

NEWSREEL XLVII

boy seeking future offered opportunity . . . good posi-
tions for bright . . . CHANCE FOR ADVANCEMENT . . . boy
to learn . . . errand boy office boy

YOUNG MAN WANTED

Oh tell me how long
I'll have to wait

OPPORTUNITY

in bank that chooses its officers from the ranks, for wide-
awake ambitious bookkeeper . . . architectural draftsman
with experience on factory and industrial buildings in brick,
timber, and reinforced concrete . . . bronze fitter . . . let-
terer . . . patternmaker . . . carriage painter . . . first class
striper and finisher . . . young man for hosiery, underwear
and notion house . . . assistant in order department . . .
first class penman accurate at figures . . . energetic hard-
worker for setting dies in power presses for metal parts

canvasser . . . flavor chemist . . . freight elevator man
. . . house salesman . . . insurance man . . . insurance

-28-

man . . . invoice clerk . . . jeweler . . . laborer . . . ma-
chinist . . . milling machine man . . . shipping clerk . . .
shipping clerk . . . shipping clerk . . . shoe salesman . . .
signwriter . . . solicitor for retail fishmarket . . . teacher
. . . timekeeper . . . tool and diemaker, tracer, toolroom
foreman, translator, typist . . . window trimmer . . . wrap-
per

OPPORTUNITY FOR

Do I get it now
Or must I hesitate

young man not afraid of hard work
young man for office
young man for stockroom
young man as stenographer
young man to travel
young man to learn

OPPORTUNITY

Oh tell me how long

to superintend municipal light, water and ice plant in
beautiful growing, healthful town in Florida's highlands . . .
to take charge of underwear department in large wholesale
mail house . . . to assist in railroad investigation . . . to take
charge of about twenty men on tools, dies, gigs and gauges
. . . as bookkeeper in stockroom . . . for light porter work
. . . civil engineer . . . machinery and die appraiser . . .
building estimator . . . electrical and power plant engineer

THE CAMERA EYE (44)

the unnamed arrival
(who had hung from the pommel of the unshod
white stallion's saddle
a full knapsack

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and leaving the embers dying in the hollow of the
barren Syrian hills where the Agail had camped when
dawn sharpshining cracked night off the ridged desert had
ridden towards the dungy villages and the patches of ses-
ame and the apricotgardens)

shaved off his beard in Damascus

and sat drinking hot milk and coffee in front of the
hotel in Beirut staring at the white hulk of Lebanon
fumbling with letters piled on the table and clipped
streamers of newsprint

addressed not to the unspeaker of arabic or the clumsy
scramblerup on camelback so sore in the rump from riding
but to someone

who

(but this evening in the soft nightclimate of the
Levantine coast the kind officials are contemplating further
improvements

scarcelybathed he finds himself cast for a role pro-
vided with a white tie carefully tied by the viceconsul.
stuffed into a boiled shirt a tailcoat too small a pair of
dresstrousers too large which the kind wife of the kind offi-
cial gigglingly fastens in the back with safetypins which
immediately burst open when he bows to the High Com-
missioner's lady faulty costuming makes the role of
eminent explorer impossible to play and the patent
leather pumps painfully squeezing the toes got lost under
the table during the champagne and speeches)

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who arriving in Manhattan finds waiting again the
forsomebodyelsetailored dress suit

the position offered the opportunity presented the col-
larbutton digging into the adamsapple while a wooden
image croaks down a table at two rows of freshlypressed
gentlemen who wear fashionably their tailored names

stuffed into shirts to caption miles lightyears of
clipped streamers of newsprint

Gentlemen I apologize it was the wrong bell it was
due to a misapprehension that I found myself on the stage
when the curtain rose the poem I recited in a foreign lan-
guage was not mine in fact it was somebody else who was
speaking it's not me in uniform in the snapshot it's a
lamentable error mistaken identity the servicerecord was
lost the gentleman occupying the swivelchair wearing the
red carnation is somebody else than

whoever it was who equipped with false whiskers was
standing outside in the rainy street and has managed un-
detected to make himself scarce down a manhole

the pastyfaced young man wearing somebody else's
readymade business opportunity

is most assuredly not

the holder of any of the positions for which he made
application at the employmentagency

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