Letters from a self-made merchant to his son

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I. From John Graham, head of the house of Gra ham & Co., at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at Harvard University, Cam bridge, Mass. — Mr. Pierrepont has just become a member, in good and regular standing, of the Fresh man class. ....... 1

II. From John Graham, in Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at Harvard University.— Mr. Pierrepont's expense account has just passed under hi8 father's eye, and has furnished him with a text for some plain particularities. .... 15

II

CHICAGO, May 4, 189 — Dear Pierrepont: The cashier has just handed me your expense account for the month, and it fairly makes a fellow humpshouldered to look it over. When I told you that I wished you to get a liberal edu cation, I didn't mean that I wanted to buy Cambridge. Of course the bills won't break me, but they will break you unless you are very, very careful.

I have noticed for the last two years that your accounts have been growing heavier every month, but I haven't seen any signs of your taking honors to justify the in creased operating expenses ; and that is bad business — a good deal like feeding his weight in corn to a scalawag steer that won't fat up.

I haven't said anything about this before, as I trusted a good deal to your native com mon-sense to keep you from making a fool of yourself in the way that some of these young fellows who haven't had to work for it do. But because I have sat tight, I don't want you to get it into your head that the old man's rich, and that he can stand it, because he won't stand it after you leave college. The sooner you adjust your spend ing to what your earning capacity will be, the easier they will find it to live together. The only sure way that a man can get rich quick is to have it given to him or to inherit it. You are not going to get rich that way — at least, not until after you have proved your ability to hold a pretty impor tant position with the firm ; and, of course, there is just one place from which a man can start for that position with Graham & <Co. It doesn't make any difference whether !he is the son of the old man or of the cellar %oss — that place is the bottom. And the bottom in the office end of this business is a seat at the mailing-desk, with eight dollars every Saturdav nigrht. ib

I can't hand out any ready-made success to you. It would do you no good, and it would do the house harm. There is plenty of room at the top here, but there is no elevator in the building. Starting, as you do, with a good education, you should be able to climb quicker than the fellow who hasn't got it; but there's going to be a time when you begin at the factory when you won't be able to lick stamps so fast as the other boys at the desk. Yet the man who hasn't licked stamps isn't fit to write letters. Naturally, that is the time when knowing whether the pie comes before the ice-cream, and how to run an automobile isn't going to be of any real use to you.

I simply mention these things because I am afraid your ideas as to the basis on which you are coming with the house have swelled up a little in the East I can give you a start, but after that you will have to dynamite your way to the front by yourself. It is all with the man. If you gave some fellows a talent wrapped in a napkin to start with in business, they would swap the talent for a gold brick and lose the napkin ; and there are others that you could start out with just a napkin, who would set up with it in the dry-goods business in a small way, and then coax the other fellow's talent into it

I have pride enough to believe that you have the right sort of stuff in you, but I want to see some of it come out. You will never make a good merchant of yourself by reversing the order in which the Lord de creed that we should proceed — learning the spending before the earning end of business. Pay day is always a month off for the spend thrift, and he is never able to realize more than sixty cents on any dollar that comes to him. But a dollar is worth one hundred and six cents to a good business man, and he never spends the dollar. It's the man who keeps saving up and expenses down that buys an interest in the concern. That 18 is where you are going to find yourself weak if your expense accounts don't lie ; and they generally don't lie in that particular way, though Baron Munchausen was the first traveling man, and my drummers' bills still show his influence.

I know that when a lot of young men get off by themselves, some of them think that recklessness with money brands them as good fellows, and that carefulness is meanness. That is the one end of a college education which is pure cussedness; and that is the one thing which makes nine business men out of ten hesitate to send their boys off to school. But on the other Land, that is the spot where a young man has the chance to show that he is not a lightweight. I know that a good many people say I am a pretty close proposi tion; that I make every hog which goes through my packing-house give up more lard than the Lord gave him gross weight; that I have improved on Nature to the extent of getting four hams out of an animal which began life with two; but you have lived with me long enough to know that my hand is usually in my pocket at the right time.

Now I want to say right here that the meanest man alive is the one who is gener ous with money that he has not had to sweat for, and that the boy who is a good fellow at some one else's expense would not work up into first-class fertilizer. That same ambition to be known as a good fellow has crowded my office with second-rate clerks, and they always will be second-rate clerks. If you have it, hold it down until you have worked for a year. Then, if your ambition runs to hunching up all week over a desk, to earn eight dollars to blow on a few rounds of drinks for the boys on Satur day night, there is no objection to your gratifying it; for I will know that the Lord didn't intend you to be your own boss.

You know how I began — I was started off 20

" / have seen hundreds of boys go to Europe who didn't bring back a great deal except a few trunks of badly fitting clothes"

with a kick, but that proved a kick up, and in the end every one since has lifted me a little bit higher. I got two dollars a week, and slept under the counter, and you can bet I knew just how many pennies there were in each of those dollars, and how hard the floor was. That is what you have got to learn.

I remember when I was on the Lakes, our schooner was passing out through the draw at Buffalo when I saw little Bill Biggs, the butcher, standing up above me on the end of the bridge with a big roast of beef in his basket. They were a little short in the gal ley on that trip, so I called up to Bill and he threw the roast down to me. I asked him how much, and he yelled back, " about a dollar." That was mighty good beef, and when we struck Buffalo again on the return trip, I thought I would like a little more of it. So I went up to Bill's shop and asked him for a piece of the same. But this time he gave me a little roast, not near so big as the other, and it was pretty tough and stringy. But when I asked him how much, he answered " about a dollar." He simply didn't have any sense of values, and that's the business man's sixth sense. Bill has al ways been a big, healthy, hard-working man, but to-day he is very, very poor.

The Bills ain't all in the butcher business. I've got some of them right now in my office, but they will never climb over the railing that separates the clerks from the execu tives. Yet if they would put in half the time thinking for the house that they give up to hatching out reasons why they ought to be allowed to overdraw their salary ac counts, I couldn't keep them out of our pri vate offices with a pole-ax, and I wouldn't want to ; for they could double their salaries and my profits in a year. But I always lay it down as a safe proposition that the fellow who has to break open the baby's bank to ward the last of the week for car-fare isn't going to be any Russell Sage when it comes 22 to trading with the old man's money. He'd punch my bank account as full of holes as a carload of wild Texans would a fool stock man that they'd got in a corner.

Now I know you'll say that I don't un derstand how it is; that you've got to do as the other fellows do; and that things have changed since I was a boy. There's nothing in it. Adam invented all the different ways in which a young man can make a fool of himself, and the college yell at the end of them is just a frill that doesn't change es sentials. The boy who does anything just because the other fellows do it is apt to scratch a poor man's back all his life. He's the chap that's buying wheat at ninetyseven cents the day before the market breaks. They call him " the country " in the market reports, but the city's full of him. It's the fellow who has the spunk to think and act for himself, and sells short when prices hit the high C and the house is standing on its hind legs yelling for more, that sits in the directors' meetings when he gets on toward forty.

We've got an old steer out at the packing house that stands around at the foot of the runway leading up to the killing pens, look ing for all the world like one of the village fathers sitting on the cracker box before the grocery — sort of sad-eyed, dreamy old cuss — always has two or three straws from his cud sticking out of the corner of his mouth. You never saw a steer that looked as if he took less interest in things. But by and by the boys drive a bunch of steers toward him, or cows maybe, if we're canning, and then you'll see Old Abe move off up that runway, sort of beckoning the bunch after him with that wicked old stump of a tail of his, as if there was something mighty interesting to steers at the top, and something that every Texan and Colorado, raw from the prairies, ought to have a look at to put a metropoli tan finish on him. Those steers just natur ally follow along on up that runway and into the killing pens. But just as they get to the top, Old Abe, someways, gets lost in the crowd, and he isn't among those present when the gates are closed and the real trouble begins for his new friends.

I never saw a dozen boys together that there wasn't an Old Abe among them. If you find your crowd following him, keep away from it. There are times when it's safest to be lonesome. Use a little common-sense, caution and conscience. You can stock a store with those three commodities, when you get enough of them. But you've got to begin getting them young. They ain't catching after you toughen up a bit.

You needn't write me if you feel your self getting them. The symptoms will show in your expense account, Good-by; life's too short to write letters and New York's calling me on the wire.

JOHN GRAHAM.

No, 3

FROM John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at Harvard University.

Mr. Pierrepont finds Cam bridge to his liking, and has suggested that he take a post-graduate course to fill up some gaps which he has found in his education.

Ill

Dear Pierrepont: No, I can't say that I think anything of your post-graduate course idea. You're not going to be a poet or a professor, but a packer, and the place to take a post-graduate course for that calling is in the packing-house. Some men learn all they know from books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all theory ; the second are all practice. It's the fellow who knows enough about practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it.

There's a chance for everything you have learned, from Latin to poetry, in the pack ing business, though we don't use much poetry here except in our street-car ads., and about the only time our products are given Latin names is when the State Board of Health condemns them. So I think 29 you'll find it safe to go short a little on the frills of education; if you want them bad enough you'll find a way to pick them up later, after business hours.

The main thing is to get a start along right lines, and that is what I sent you to college for. I didn't expect you to carry off all the education in sight — I knew you'd leave a little for the next fellow. But I wanted you to form good mental habits, just as I want you to have clean, straight physical ones. Because I was run through a threshing machine when I was a boy, and didn't begin to get the straw out of my hair till I was past thirty, I haven't any sym pathy with a lot of these old fellows who go around bragging of their ignorance and saying that boys don't need to know any thing except addition and the " best policy " brand of honesty.

We started in a mighty different world, and we were all ignorant together. The Lord let us in on the ground floor, gave us corner lots, and then started in to improve the adjacent property. We didn't have to know fractions to figure out our profits. Now a merchant needs astronomy to see them, and when he locates them they are out somewhere near the fifth decimal place. There are sixteen ounces to the pound still, but two of them are wrapping paper in a good many stores. And there're just as many chances for a fellow as ever, but they're a little gun shy, and you can't catch them by any such coarse method as putting salt on their tails.

Thirty years ago, you could take an old muzzle-loader and knock over plenty of ducks in the city limits, and Chicago wasn't Cook County then, either. You can get them still, but you've got to go to Kankakee and take a hammerless along. And when I started in the packing business it was all straight sailing — no frills — just turning hogs into hog meat — dry salt for the niggers down South and sugar-cured for the white folks up North. Everything else was sausage, or thrown away. But when we get through with a hog nowadays, he's scattered through a hundred different cans and packages, and he's all accounted for. What we used to throw away is our profit. It takes doctors, lawyers, engineers, poets, and I don't know what, to run the busi ness, and I reckon that improvements which call for parsons will be creeping in next. Naturally, a young man who expects to hold his own when he is thrown in with a lot of men like these must be as clean and sharp as a hound's tooth, or some other fellow's simply going to eat him up.

The first college man I ever hired was old John Durham's son, Jim. That was a good many years ago when the house was a much smaller affair. Jim's father had a lot of money till he started out to buck the uni verse and corner wheat. And the boy took all the fancy courses and trimmings at col lege. The old man was mighty proud of

Jim. Wanted him to be a literary fellow. But old Durham found out what every one learns who gets his ambitions mixed up with number two red — that there's a heap of it lying around loose in the country. The bears did quick work and kept the cash wheat coming in so lively that one settling day half a dozen of us had to get under the market to keep it from going to ever lasting smash.

That day made young Jim a candidate for a job. It didn't take him long to de cide that the Lord would attend to keep ing up the visible supply of poetry, and that he had better turn his attention to the stocks of mess pork. Next morning he was laying for me with a letter of introduction when I got to the office, and when he found that I wouldn't have a private secretary at any price, he applied for every other posi tion on the premises right down to office boy. I told him I was sorry, but I couldn't do anything for him then; that we were letting men go, but I'd keep him in mind, and so on. The fact was that I didn't think a fellow with Jim's training would be much good, anyhow. But Jim hung on — said he'd taken a fancy to the house, and wanted to work for it Used to call by about twice a week to find out if anything had turned up.

Finally, after about a month of this, he wore me down so that I stopped him one day as he was passing me on the street. I thought I'd find out if he really was so red-hot to work as he pretended to be; be sides, I felt that perhaps I hadn't treated the boy just right, as I had delivered quite a jag of that wheat to his father myself.

"Hello, Jim," I called; "do you still want that job?"

" Yes, sir," he answered, quick as light ning.

" Well, I tell you how it is, Jim," I said, looking up at him — he was one of those husky, lazy-moving six-footers — " I don't

BETTERS TO HIS SON

see any chance in the office, but I under stand they can use another good, strong man in one of the loading gangs."

I thought that would settle Jim and let me out, for it's no joke lugging beef, or rolling barrels and tierces a hundred yards or so to the cars. But Jim came right back at me with, " Done. Who'll I report to? "

That sporty way of answering, as if he was closing a bet, made me surer than ever that he was not cut out for a butcher. But I told him, and off he started hot-foot to find the foreman. I sent word by another route to see that he got plenty to do.

I forgot all about Jim until about three months later, when his name was handed up to me for a new place and a raise in pay. It seemed that he had sort of abolished his job. After he had been rolling barrels a while, and the sport had ground down one of his shoulders a couple of inches lower than the other, he got to scheming around for a way to make the work easier, and he hit on an idea for a sort of overhead rail road system, by which the barrels conld be swung out of the storerooms and run right along into the cars, and two or three men do the work of a gang. It was just as I thought. Jim was lazy, but he had put the house in the way of saving so much money that I couldn't fire him. So I raised his salary, and made him an assistant time keeper and checker. Jim kept at this for three or four months, until his feet began to hurt him, I guess, and then he was out of a job again. It seems he had heard something of a new machine for registering the men, that did away with most of the timekeepers except the fellows who watched the machines, and he kept after the Superin tendent until he got him to put them in. Of course he claimed a raise again for ef fecting such a saving, and we just had to allow it.

I was beginning to take an interest in Jim, so I brought him up into th* office and set him to copying circular letters. We used to send out a raft of them to the trade. That was just before the general adoption of typewriters, when they were still in the experimental stage. But Jim hadn't been in the office plugging away at the letters for a month before he had the writer's cramp, and began nosing around again. The first thing I knew he was sicking the agents for the new typewriting machine on to me, and he kept them pounding away until they had made me give them a trial. Then it was all up with Mister Jim's job again. I raised his salary without his ask ing for it this time, and put him out on the road to introduce a new product that we were making — beef extract.

Jim made two trips without selling enough to keep them working overtime at the factory, and then he came into my office with a long story about how we were doing it all wrong. Said we ought to go for the consumer by advertising, and make the trade came to us, instead of chasing it up.

That was so like Jim that I just laughed at first; besides, that sort of advertising was a pretty new thing then, and I was one of the old-timers who didn't take any stock in it. But Jim just kept plugging away at me between trips, until finally I took him off the road and told him to go ahead and try it in a small way.

Jim pretty nearly scared me to death that first year. At last he had got into some thing that he took an interest in — spending money — and he just fairly wallowed in it. Used to lay awake nights, thinking up new ways of getting rid of the old man's profits. And he found them. Seemed as if I couldn't get away from Graham's Extract, and whenever I saw it I gagged, for I knew it was costing me money that wasn't coming back; but every time I started to draw in my horns Jim talked to me, and showed me

" I put Jim Durham out on the road to introduce a new product, ' '

where there was a fortune waiting for me just around the corner.

Graham's Extract started out by being something that you could make beef-tea out of — that was all. But before Jim had been fooling with it a month he had got his girl to think up a hundred different ways in which it could be used, and had adver tised them all. It seemed there was nothing you could cook that didn't need a dash of it. He kept me between a chill and a sweat all the time. Sometimes, but not often, I just had to grin at his foolishness. I re member one picture he got out showing six teen cows standing between something that looked like a letter-press, and telling how every pound or so of Graham's Extract contained the juice squeezed from a herd of steers. If an explorer started for the North Pole, Jim would send him a case of Extract, and then advertise that it was the great heat^ maker for cold climates; and if some other fellow started across Africa he sent him a case, too, and advertised what a bully drink it was served up with a little ice.

He broke out in a new place every day, and every time he broke out it cost the house money. Finally, I made up my mind to swallow the loss, and Mister Jim was just about to lose his job sure enough, when the orders for Extract began to look up, and he got a reprieve; then he began to make expenses, and he got a pardon; and finally a rush came that left him high and dry in a permanent place. Jim was all right in his way, but it was a new way, and I hadn't been broad-gauged enough to see that it was a better way.

That was where I caught the connection between a college education and business. I've always made it a rule to buy brains, and I've learned now that the better trained they are the faster they find reasons for getting their salaries raised. The fellow who hasn't had the training may be just as 40 smart, but he's apt to paw the air when he's reaching for ideas.

I suppose you're asking why, if I'm so hot for education, I'm against this post graduate course. But habits of thought ain't the only thing a fellow picks up at college.

I see you've been elected President of your class. I'm glad the boys aren't down on you, but while the most popular man in his class isn't always a failure in busi ness, being as popular as that takes up a heap of time. I noticed, too, when you were home Easter, that you were running to sporty clothes and cigarettes. There's noth ing criminal about either, but I don't hire sporty clerks at all, and the only part of the premises on which cigarette smoking is allowed is the fertilizer factory.

I simply mention this in passing. I have every confidence in your ultimate good sense, and I guess you'll see the point with out my elaborating with a meat ax my reasons for thinking that you've had enougk college for the present.

JOHN GRAHAM.

No, 4

FROM John Graham, head of the house of Graham & Co., at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont Graham, at the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York. Mr. Pierre pont has suggested the grand tour as a proper finish to his education.

IV

Dear Pierrepont: Your letter of the sev enth twists around the point a good deal like a setter pup chasing his tail. But I gather from it that you want to spend a couple of months in Europe before coming on here and getting your nose in the bull ring. Of course, you are your own boss now and you ought to be able to judge better than any one else how much time you have to waste, but it seems to me, on general principles, that a young man of twenty-two, who is physically and mentally sound, and who hasn't got a dollar and has never earned one, can't be getting on some body's pay-roll too quick. And in this connection it is only fair to tell you that I have instructed the cashier to discontinue your allowance after July 15. That gives you two weeks for a vacation — enough to make a sick boy well, or a lazy one lazier.

I hear a good deal about men who won't take vacations, and who kill themselves by overwork, but it's usually worry or whiskey. It's not what a man does during workinghours, but after them, that breaks down his health. A fellow and his business should be bosom friends in the office and sworn enemies out of it. A clear mind is one that is swept clean of business at six o'clock every night and isn't opened up for it again until after the shutters are taken down next morning.

Some fellows leave the office at night and start out to whoop it up with the boys, and some go home to sit up with their troubles — they're both in bad company. They're the men who are always needing vacations, and never getting any good out of them. What every man does need once a year is a change of work — that is, if he has been curved up over a desk for fifty weeks and subsisting on birds and burgundy, he ought to take to fishing for a living and try bacon and eggs, with a little spring water, for dinner. But coming from Harvard to the packing house will give you change enough this year to keep you in good trim, even if you didn't have a fortnight's leeway to run loose.