IF I could have lived my life according to a program of desire I would have been engaged in pure science all my days; physics interested me intensely when I was in Aurora. I had a chum named Wynn Meredith. His enthusiasT9 for electricity infected me. When we saw a design for a dynamo in the Scientific American we determined to make one. I had the castings made in the shop. The project took us several months. I got a real lesson out of winding the armature. I learned that if you missed doing a thing right at one turn you never could cover it up with the next. If I failed to spool the wire on with every strand snugly in its place the hump of the flaw would show in spite of everything until I unwrapped enough wire to make it right. Our dynamo worked, and years afterward I heard that it was still being used in a little silver-plating factory in Aurora. I even tried to get a job with the new electric company which had put arc lamps on steel towers one hundred and fifty feet high in order to light the city. They offered me work inserting carbons in the lamps, but I decided I was not sufficiently interested in elec tricity for that; every lamp was to be reached only after a hazardous, dizzy climb; I had too much cau tion. I figured I might learn more about electricity at
college and began sending for catalogues. In the mean time, I was earning a little extra money teaching alge bra to some of my shop-mates at fifty cents an hour, but I was spending the money taking German lessons; and from Myron Stolp, an inventor of uncommercial devices and son of one of the town's big men, I was taking mathematics, descriptive geometry. I was de termined I was not going to spend the rest of my life in overalls at a lathe in a machine-shop. But how was I to get out? Looking backward now I am amazed that in six moves I got out of overalls and became the presi dent of the nation's biggest bank. Then, of course, I was not even thinking of banking.
Wynn Meredith had decided to go to the University of Illinois, but I wanted to attend a college that could increase my understanding of electricity. Cornell, the only one that offered such a course, was, however, too far away for my purse, so I also went to Champaign. There at Illinois I was told I would have to take an entrance examination and shuddered outside the door of the professor who was, first of all, going to test my knowledge of English.
"What have you read?" he asked me and it seems , to me now that his eyes rested understandingly on the bruised and broken finger-mils, the grease-etched lines on my hands that were fluttering about my clothes in search of pockets to hide in.
"Shakespeare," I blurted.
"Well," he said very gently, "tell me about some one of his plays that you have read."
ESCAPE FROM OVERALLS 25 and that kind gentleman listened as intently, with as
much genuine interest, as if Shakespeare himself were sl"anding there telling it for the first time. When I stopped talking he nodded and smiled upon me with real friendship and made me understand that I was thenceforth a member of the student body; I was "in" college. Well, even to-day I think it was a sensible examination, though I realize that the modern cur ricula require proofs of wider knowledge, of more solid foundations.
Pledged to be room-mates, Wynn and I went looking for the least expensive living accommodations we could find, and so we entered the establishment of a board ing-house lady right out of Dickens. She looked like her name, she behaved in keeping with it, and whenever she spoke I felt Mrs. Scroggins was as perfect an ex
ample of onomatopreia as ever I encountered.
I have somewhere in my archives my account-book of that year and the expenditures total $226. It had been money saved out of my $4.43 a week; none of it was borrowed, but with the end of the school year when it was all gone there was nothing for me to do but to go back to the shop, to put on my overalls and take my place again at a lathe. The general superin tendent of the plant found time to tell me that they planned to put me at other jobs, and I was given to understand that some day I might rise to a position like that of Ambrose Higgins, the foreman. Somehow the knowledge that Mr. Higgins's job was what was in store for me settled the thing, stiffened my spine. J made up my mind right then and there that I would
not have my career in that shop. I was getting $ 1.25 a
day; a journeyman machinist able to work at my trade at lathe or bench. I might have gone anywhere with such a passport, but I knew I had to get out of overalls and do something, anything else. I think I was really desperate then. I yearned as much as ever to go to college, but it seemed out of the question since I was the only man of a family of women; and I had no one with influence to smooth a path for me. That was when my eye was caught by an advertisement of a course of shorthand taught by mail. Tachygraphy it was called. :I subscribed. With a piece of chalk I practiced making the shorthand characters on the tail stock of my lathe. r worked diligently because r had persuaded myself that those cabalistic signs were going to be the wizard formula by means of which I was to be released from the enchantment of overalls and a factory. Just think ing and wishing fervently was like a chemical change in the situation, and when word was passed around that the shop was going to shut d()wn for a few weeks I swelled with eagerness. In I-hose days when business was slack the euphemistic expl anation was given that the factory was going to "take inventory."
That was when I saw the chance to make my first move; to get out of overalls. The very day of the shut down I read in the Aurora EVC1zitig Post an item of news that probably had been written and set in type by the person concerned; it was an announcement of the departure of the city editor to another city and another joh. I had never written anything and can recall now nothing to explain the nerve, the daring that carried
ESCAPE FROM OVERALLS 27 me, after a sleepless night, into the office of the pub lisher of the newspaper to ask him for the job of city editor.
His name was Constantine; he owned the paper and he ran it, but how well he ran it you may gather from the fact that he gave me what I asked for. Six dollars a week was the pay and quite often I had to go out and collect the amount from delinquent subscribers or ad vertisers, for rarely was there that much money in the till. The paper was housed in a one-story wooden build ing of two rooms, and which was the most gummy with a deposit.vf chewing tobacco it would be hard for me to say with accuracy. The year was 1885 and I was twenty-one, but my soul was inches taller because I was now a personage. Calling myself city editor meant more to me then than to have suddenly discovered that I possessed a patent of nobility and might call myself baron.
City Editor! It was there in the lower left-hand corner of the cards that were printed for me in the job-room which was the same room that sheltered the hand-press from which came all copies of the Aurora Evening Post when some one, generally me, turned a big wheel; but I was strong. I lea rned to set type, too, so that as we got close to the end of our day and the back room was noisy with rowdy carrier boys, I could stand at a case and put my information, never my !'houghts, into shape for printing. I really ought to re port, though, that my work was half done in the morning when I met the Burlington train from Chicago III.! got a long, heavy box that contained our ratiori of
boiler plate; lead-cast feature stories, fashion notes and other filler material that came to us ready to go into the forms without further treatment except saw ing for length. I went to the police-station, I went to the city hall, and to the other sources of routine news and although the expression was not then in use I was, in Aurora, at least within the person of Frank A. Vanderlip, a big shot. Actually I was, too. Not many people in Aurora had an annual pass that would carry them free anywhere on the Burlington Railroad. That little reddish piece of cardboard made me seem im portant to myself and railroad conductors spoke, I fancied, a little more considerately to me than to ordinary passengers who had to pay for tickets. On a Saturday afternoon with a clear conscience I could catch a train to Quincy or run up to Chicago. One night up there at the Chicago Opera House I saw Booth play Othello and Lawrence Barrett play Iago, and then the next night I returned with thousands of others and saw Barrett play Othello and Booth play Iago. I saw Booth play Hamlet, too, and put a little piece about it in the paper.
Once I went to- Geneva, the seat of Kane .county, to cover a murder trial. A farmer, in what was a not infrequent occurrence in pioneer farming, had been involved in a controversy over a line fence; he had shot and killed his neighbor. The defendant's name was Hope and his lawyer was a man named Elbert Gary. Hope was given a fairly light sentence. A long, long time afterward when I mentioned that trial to Judge Gary, of the United States Steel Corporation,
ESCAPE FROM OVERALLS 29 I had a feeling that the corporation lawyer was not particularly interested in the fact that I had believed, that day in Geneva, that he had made a brilliant de fense and a poignant appeal for jury sympathy for the murderer. All too quickly we began to talk of other matters, of corporation affairs.
But the big, the significant thing that happened to me while I was working on the Aurora paper was a friendship I formed with a man named Joseph French Johnson. If a man's life, as a chemical solution, may have the rate of its reactions accelerated by a catalyst, then this friendship was for me just such a changing force. He had been born in Aurora, the son of a grocer, had gone to Harvard, then to the German uni versity at Halle. He had come back to the United States and worked on the old Springfield Republican
under Sam Bowles. This man, Joe Johnson, returning to Aurora, had married the sister of Myron Stolp who had continued to tutor me in mathematics. To me this tall, blond man of the world who made me quite com fortable by being not too tidy in his habits of dress, was the most exciting individual I had ever en-. countered. At this time he had a job in Chicago with a firm which represented, I think, the very beginnings of a craft, a business, the members of which speak of themselves now as investment counselors.
I used to go shyly to see Johnson at his house in the evenings when he had returned from his day's work in Chicago. I knew that he worked for a man there named Moses Scudder, but I had only a vague idea what Scudder did. Then Johnson proposed to me that
I might, in view of my shorthand accomplishment, Tachygraphy, take a job in Chicago as a stenographer. I took the job and I had made my second move. I was paid $ I 5 a week; in the present as I gaze out across my sloping lawn to the far side of the Hudson River and think of all that I have had, I realize my wage was much, much larger than $ I 5 a week; but Moses
Scudder, of course, knew nothing of that. \¥hen he found out that I would have to learn how to run his typewriter my fate, for a minute or two, was back in the balance; but he nodded and r was hired.
CHAPTER IV