Part 26

Here let us state in calm, well modulated tones that we are not forgetting about the office boy, around whose life this little narrative is written, or wrotten. We are letting him alone until he grows into manhood.

The office boy is now grown and so is the business.

The boy is Alfred William Clerkmind, and he is the President of the whole outfit.

The old proprietor has long since been mounded and marked, and the Sales & Advertising Manager, of whom we spoke of, or rather, about whom we spoke about, is still reading Printers Ink and learning how they put it over.

Alfred William Clerkmind has been so busy growing up with the business that he has never had time to travel any farther from home than the one-lunged Country Club for nine holes on a Sunday morning.

His reading has been confined to his Trade Magazine, his home town daily, and his competitors’ catalogues.

The people he has met socially are the same earspreaders he used to know as boys and girls in the days when he was juggling up the mail in the leather sack, size 24″ x 36″.

The men he has met in a business way, all have come down to the bowlegged burg to sell him something, and so he has always had eager listeners whenever he talked from the chest out; so he has been denied the golden privilege of having men tell him to his cone-shaped face just what they thought of him and his Ideas.

In other phraseology, Alfred William Clerkmind, executive, is Alfred William Clerkmind, office boy, with different scenery. His arms and legs are longer, his body thicker, his head fatter than when he licked stamps, but his psychology and general outlook are the same.

He tells his New York Salesman that one can live for four dollars a week at the best boarding house in Skunkton with Neapolitan ice cream every Sunday, and therefore any man should be able to do the same in New York—or do better, because there’s a bigger choice in Noo Yoark.

Every time it comes to changing copy in the ads, they have to throw him and blindfold him to keep him from re-writing it himself and running in a lot of snappy, pungent stuff of the come-one-come-all, we-strive-to-please variety.

Alfred William doesn’t understand why a salesman should ride in a Pullman any more than why the Trade shouldn’t wiggle up on its abdomen and beg for the Goods.

And since he has not the time to travel, nor read, nor meet people who do, he has no way of getting at the facts of business.

He feels that he must personally ooze into every part of the works at all times. And, as a consequence, none of the department heads cares to assume the responsibility of sealing an envelope without getting Alfie’s “O. K.”

Sometimes Alfie tries to be a good fellow, and thereupon he slaps somebody a wooden slap on the back. But there’s something in his playfulness that makes the recip. feel like turning around and spreading his resentment all over Alfie’s respectable features.

When anybody is relating a humorsome narrative, Alfie sets a certain time and place to laugh regardless of the development of the story, and then there’s no telling how long the rafters are going to hold out. Then just as suddenly he gets back into his coffin and pulls down the lid.

At such times Alfie’s voice has about as much merriment in it as a sack of dried apples, but whenever he decides to burst forth, all the little office gnats have got to laugh too, for fear they will lose their Fifty Dollar jobs if they don’t.

Emerson says that every institution is the lengthened shadow of the kanoop that started it, and we are not mentioning this just to show how clubby we are with Ralph’s sayings, but to clear up any outstanding doubt that the institution of which Alfred William Clerkmind is the head and front, and coat, pants and collar-button, reflects in every detail the spirit of the big, broad, ruddycheeked Captain of Industry that steers it.

An idea might walk into that Works and hang around for six months, and not a man in the whole outfit would invite it to come in and sit down.

The most important business of the week that any of the inmates has on his mind is how to get the shirt back from the Chinaman’s in time for the Saturday night dance at the Commercial Ath-a-letic Club.

We started this story with the intention of showing how Alfred William Clerkmind finally made a trip to Kankakee and broadened out. But he can’t seem to make up his mind which train he will take, and in the meantime the space alloted to us for this story has run out.

So we can only say in closing that no business can expect to wax international when the Chief Executive is carrying around with him the same cow-licked sky-piece that he used when he was bowlegging up the street with the morning’s mail in a sack.

Lesson for Today: As one grows older, the head should change inside as well as outside.

HOT SKETCH NO. 21

THE WAR WINNING PATRIOTEER

HE WAS paunchy and broad-beamed and looked like one of Artist Young’s skippers of industry.

The top of his dome was mercerized but there was a sturdy little hedge of auburn stubble running west of a line drawn parallel with the top of his right listener.

This served as a dam to catch the honest perspiration from running down on his Henry Clay collar.