GEORGE HOYT ALLEN
George Hoyt Allen Who Will Write Stories of Travel and Adventure for La Follette's By HIMSELF Not long ago we got hold of a Httle booklet written by George Hoyt Allen. It was called "I Am...
...I believe I could do it...
...None of these grand themes for your Uncle Dudley...
...I borrowed $1,000 from a brother...
...My travel dope may not please your readers...
...Two years later I was spending the winter in Italy with my wife and in the dining-room of our hotel, opposite us at table, sat a little woman industriously perusing "The Man with a Scheme, or Hot Stuff for Souvenirs...
...We liked It...
...Never been in politics...
...A paper label, pasted on the handle of a knife sharpener in the hands of the "Cinderella" in the kitchen, would last a few times, but getting wet would soon be useless as an advertisement...
...Me for a change, the bottom is falling out of this thing...
...One little Irish boy could print one thousand of those knife sharpeners, in forty minutes, with that Yankee contrivance of mine, beautifully, directly on the wood...
...Irish veneer," said I to myself...
...But, gentlemen, I give you fair warning...
...I accepted their proposition, and wrote some letters for their paper, which I later published in book form, as a complimentary card to hand to my friends in the furniture trade...
...A few facts in my career...
...The letters I received in answer were amusing...
...I mailed one of those booklets to the furniture trade in the United States, Canada and England...
...Isn't it just that common interest in life outside our own ken that makes us enjoy our Marco Polos and our African huntsmen and our Arette explorers and our "travelogue" artists: Negotiations were forthwith begun...
...Having gotten over as far as square root in Ray's Practical Arithmetic during one of those winter terms at a district school, I had the figures with me...
...boss) "If I could milk my country As I milk my cow, I'd make things win, I'd make things spin...
...That she had brought the booklet with her for a hand-book to Naples, and she said some kind words about that little screed...
...The next year I went around the world and established my polish in foreign countries, and-wrote another booklet, the "Commercial Pilgrim...
...You may laugh, but milking Brindle with unstrapped hind legs had the principle that finally won...
...He is a keen observer...
...Allen, we discovered, Is a good story-teller...
...One of them had to have her hind legs strapped before she could be milked...
...You'd better print a label and paste it on...
...I managed to work in three winter terms at a district school during those eight years, and at the age of seventeen I migrated to Pennsylvania and got a job in a furniture factory, sandpapering painted cottage furniture at S3.00 per—week...
...Taking the good with the bad—no work, slack work and full work—(there were times when it was easy to make $11.00 to $15.00 a day) —I cleaned up $1,200 that last year...
...it's more than we pay the minister of our church—he only gets $700 a year, George...
...He Is a business man...
...We were charmed by his stories...
...There were twenty of them, and what those boys didn't want to do would hardly be worth mentioning...
...We liked him even more than we liked his sketches...
...was encouraged by that crack grainer, and one day, during the noon-hour, catching me trying my hand at his job, with his tools, that same grainer promptly kicked me down two flights of stairs...
...In October of that year a varnish drummer, in company with the proprietor, blew into the factory, and remarked in my hearing, "I see you run a lot of this 'Irish veneer,' "—meaning my imitation of French walnut...
...Failing this precaution, I used to get kicked up to the rafters...
...and asked him if he'd trust me...
...bossy...
...When I had that job, on the morning of the 22nd of June I forgot to go to work, and they got another boy, Arasmus Doan, to take my place...
...You'll find my patent recorded in the archives of the patent office of this glorious republic, issued September 29, 1891, No...
...The combination of a disastrous fire, an on-coming war and cold feet—(not mine, I was hot all over, including my feet) and I found myself busted higher than Gilroy's kite, much worse off than nothing...
...When I git home I hain't goin' to write no book and I hain't goin' to deliver no lectures...
...Baedaker, beware...
...Got a job when I was eight years old, taking shingles and sawdust from a big buzz saw in a shingle mill, at 25 cents per—said pers being of twelve hours duration on an average the year around, from sun-up to sun-down...
...Brindle Enters my Life THEN I got a job on a farm...
...so-o, boss...
...Allen to send us the story of his career so we could Introduce him properly to our readers...
...At the end of a year I came back to Pennsylvania and took a contract to finish painted furniture for a firm in a little town nearby the city where I started my career as a finisher...
...While deeply pained at the indignity, the fact that I had no business monkeying with his tools, coupled with his superior size and age, caused me to suffer the indignity in silence—and ftraightway to buy a second-hand kit of grainer's tools, paint some boards and practice graining after working hours in the attic of my boarding place...
...The farmer for whom I worked frowned at the loss of time consumed in strapping her legs, as the cows had to be milked on a fast schedule so that the milk might connect with the dealer's wagon which always arrived punctually...
...He told people things they liked to hear about, in a captivating way...
...covering for them sixteen states between Montreal and Key West, also taking care of the Metropolitan District...
...My friend Bert Dickinson, of the house of Dickinson Brothers in Grand Rapids, Michigan, published my booklet—an edition of seventeen thousand...
...and said they might attempt for $10,000 to build a press to do the work, but they wouldn't guarantee it to be satisfactory...
...If you do, I'd advise you to only hit the high lights—no one wants shadows...
...I threw out my chest and felt that I hadn't lived entirely in vain—my advertising booklet being used as a guide-book to Naples...
...All the last named counsins deal in furniture...
...Two years later I went again to China and Japan and the Philippine Islands, primarily to keep in touch with my agencies in the Orient and to buy more oriental novelties for the friends I had placed the first lot with, together with added commissions from many other dealers, and also, incidentally, to look over the Philippine Islands...
...My friends have been kind enough to call them unique...
...No, George, no," he said, "but $1,200 a year is more than we can afford to pay...
...So long...
...Send for the Preacher...
...Then through file Malacca Straits, visiting Penang and Singapore, across India, through the Holy Land, Egypt and Turkey, and home via Europe, taking in the Ober-ammergau on the way...
...and I've a lurking suspicion that I couldn't thrill your readers with a dissertation on scenery...
...The paper was published in my printing establishment,—a boy's play paper...
...His philosophy of life is of the wholesome, cheerful kind...
...Nearly all the principles involved in doing "57 + Varieties" of work during the "ideal life" I led on the farm, I exhausted before I won out...
...I conceived the idea of coating a round stick a foot long and five-eighths of an inch in diameter with emery, leaving four inches on one end uncoated for a handle, and printing my advertisement around it...
...That picture was laughing...
...Allen (as he himself admits) is not a "literary cuss...
...Old story—"poor but honest parents" and had to hustle early...
...Being fresh from the country, the boys in the shop called me "Pumpkin...
...Another printing press establishment gave me the "Ha...
...Hooking Up With Vesuvius IN APRIL, 1906, when Mt...
...He voiced his resolution to me in the following words...
...After they were dry, the handles were dipped in varnish, and my novelty was complete...
...I use the word "gentle" with reservations...
...One of them that I think I came nearest welching on was the manufacture of a simple little knife sharpener...
...Now, George," he added, "we are willing that you should make $1,000 a year, and at this schedule of prices you can easily do it...
...They were about the greatest bunch of live wires that I've ever had any experience with...
...We told Mr...
...They had fancy grainers in that factory that made $10.00 a day...
...He said, "Pay me when you can, George...
...Well," I said, "he couldn't begin to make $700 a year if you turned him on to my job...
...He was the magnate of the town, a strong church member and an austere man...
...The difference between $3.00 a week and $10.00 a day appealed to me...
...Many of those dealers are today our most loyal customers...
...That's the ideal life...
...and its title is "The Man with a Scheme, or Hot Stuff for Souvenirs...
...Why not pass It along to our readers...
...Starting my career of furniture finisher in February, December of that same year found me in a little town in New York State, where there was a firm which v. as badly in need of a grainer, and I promptly told them that I was all kinds of a grainer—there wasn't anthing I couldn't grain...
...Pen Plus Ideas Equals Easy Street IN TEN days, my booklets were published and expressed to Clinton...
...He replied in so characteristic a vein that we have decided to print his letter...
...Not the guide-book variety, but the kind that have to do with people—real, live human beings—and with adventures that befall the traveller...
...HOW a chance word will often change a man's career...
...Ten of those gentle creatures were apportioned to me...
...I started with this house in 1884, and in December of that year I married the best woman on earth in the village of Clinton, N. Y., where our home has been ever since, and I'm still a more or less desirable citizen of that hamlet...
...It took three or four months to experiment, and several thousand dollars, before I learned how to coat that stick, satisfactorily, with emery...
...He manages to extract a lot of fun out of everything that happens...
...My efforts have been to please my wife, an old maid aunty, and a dear old school-teacher (she of the district school) and about twenty thousand cousins...
...There was "nothin' 'doin'" on that schedule as reported from conference...
...Allen that he would reach an appreciative audience through LA FOLLETTE'S...
...I never could understand why boys want to leave the farm...
...Today I am an insurgent, and he is—well, I really don't know whether he is a stand-patter or not...
...It worked because the originator of it understood human nature...
...I hired some of those boys, who called me "Pumpkin," to do the common work, plain staining, varnishing and sand-papering, while / put on the fancy French walnut graining...
...In all my foreign travels I only call to mind, at this minute, one Simon pure, dyed-in-the-wool, wise traveler...
...My attempt at this thing, so far, has been a purely family affair anyway...
...I knew La Follette's had nerve...
...I'm thinking how— So, boss— ' can make things win— Make the old thing spin— So...
...Irian Veneer" and $1,200 Per...
...I have nothing but kindly feelings for him...
...WHAT'S THAT...
...The bottom fell out of imitation painted furniture a few years later and the probabilities are that if that chance sneer—"Irish veneer"—and the merciless paring down of the schedule had never happened, I'd be swinging a paint brush- on the side of a building today or be but an indifferent paper-hanger...
...Vesuvius lava with every bottle of our polish...
...At the end of three years I got a better job with one of the largest houses in Grand Rapids, Michigan, manufacturing a fine line of furniture...
...Result: he Kent UN more of bis works, said works being: stories of his travels in foreign lands...
...bossy: so-o, boss— As the wheels in my head Keep going round, I say to myself, "With logic profound, (Bu"t out loud I say, so-o...
...That story is writ and illustrated with those photographs...
...You want me to be a pencil pusher for La follette's, on a business trip this year around the world...
...You haven't the experience to command such a salary, you are only a boy...
...For a few minutes it seemed to me that 1 was back at the "ideal life," trying to milk Brindle with her legs unstrapped...
...Inventer, George H. Allen...
...We shouldn't give them to yon If we didn't...
...That selved, I felt the victory was mine...
...Butted...
...The difference in cost on that kind of work in this country and Timbucktoo had been met and fully adjusted...
...Ever work for 25 cents a day tending buzz saw in a shingle mill from sun-up to sun-down, along about the 21st of June...
...We were delighted with his quaint humor...
...Every store on earth Would handle my stuff, Till I could say...
...He Is the sort of a man who can laugh when things go wrong, and he can make you laugh with him...
...I go first to the Hawaiian Islands, across to Japan, through the Inland Sea to China, down the coast to Hong Kong and across to the Philippines...
...Feeling that the ozone of the Western mountains would do me good, in the year 1890 I started for the Pacific coast with a bottle of my polish in one hand and that knife sharpener in the other...
...I was only a boy...
...While in China and Japan, on that trip, I bought a little jag of oriental nevelties that I thought would sell in furniture stores and parcelled them out to some of my furniture dealer frends...
...He took to traveling and to writing primarily for the purpose of getting said people Interested in said goods...
...Furthermore, there's an appalling competition in this travel writing...
...This wise traveler had made a bunch of easy money, and he had blown in a portion of it in thoroughly touring Europe...
...I have done many advertising stunts in connection with my polish business...
...bossy...
...of my sympathies with what it is trying to do...
...Met him on my last trip coining home from Europe...
...His price for the job was $300.00...
...Never had a lawsuit...
...We wrote Mr...
...During the coming year, therefore, a new feature will be added to LA FOLLETTE'S...
...It Is contagious...
...One of the things they did was to publish a little club paper called the Garcia Monthly—we called ourselves the "Garcia Club...
...All you ask is a few sketches "in ray inimitable style?'' "Not to interfere with my regular business...
...If the above-named piffling but necessary chores could be defined as work, then the hours were longer than those in the shingle mill, but there was a slight increase in salary and more variety to the work—much more...
...Were I to tell of them all, it would fill a book—two books—many books...
...Accompanying it was a circular announcing the fact that I was doing business at the old stand, putting out my old reliable furniture polish, and that I would be pleased to be favored with their orders...
...10, 1910...
...do you know that the trick can't be done...
...He was an Insurgent with a capital I. But I was a stand-patter...
...My idea was simply to rell the handle over rubber-faced type...
...Later we got acquainted with Mr...
...I didn't begin to do the subject justice...
...I've kicked myself for over forty years because I didn't forget to go to work in that shingle mill on the 20th day of June— thus putting the longest day in the year over on to Aramus, while he was fresh—he was a great big fellow, years older than myself—he was ten...
...In attempting this stunt I'm going to stick to what comes easy to me—something I can handle with nice, little, short, easy words...
...Easy When You Know How TWO years later I again went to the Orient in the interests of my polish and importing business, and later found it necessary to make still another journey to the "Land of the Rising Sun," and this year I must go again, my fifth trip, and I'm just beginning to get on to the quirks of the Oriental mind...
...The mill people spread the report that they had fired me but that was a mistake...
...Some were gentler than others...
...I thanked them for their advice...
...That natty varnish drummer and his "Irish veneer" was working in my system...
...That's more than any other laboring man in town has made...
...You and I will understand...
...I established agencies for my polish all the way from Clinton to the coast and back again, with furniture dealers, giving them knife sharpeners as an inducement...
...Vesuvius was erupting her worst, I conceived the idea of going to Italy, getting a cargo of the lava, the papers talked about, shipping it back to this country and presenting with our compliments a chunk of Mt...
...Why not have Mr, Allen write some stories about his next trip for LA FOLLtTTE'Sf Here was a "good thing...
...On page twenty-three, the little booklet had this statement, "I'm glad I'm alive and know how to make furniture polish...
...If you find that your subscribers are leaving you, after I get fairly going, you can come out with a little explanatory note telling how Allen got writer's cramp in Japan writing an account of how firmly Mt...
...I told him to send for the preacher, that I was going to quit That to make $1,200.00 last year and only $1,000.00 this year wasn't the direction I was headed for...
...Allen no...
...Fusiyand was rooted to its base,—or, mayhap, from Egypt, giving you the dimensions of the pyramids and telling you the thrilling tale of how long they've stayed in one place—and that no more of his "inimitable stuff'' will appear until he has recovered...
...I've got a million things to do between this and sailing day...
...I invented and built it myself and got it patented...
...They didn't offer me $5,000 for my efforts, but they assured me that they'd give me very favorable rates in their advertising pages...
...Do you know I think the wisdom of that man's resolution far outweighed any fault some captious person might find with his syntax...
...Few things escape him...
...Also he has a sense of humor...
...We think you will...
...You want to tell your readers about what you've caught...
...Do you really think it wise to muss up a page of La Follette's with the story...
...George Hoyt Alien will write a series of sketches, In bis own unique and entertaining style, about his travels among the people of the Orient...
...From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Lakes to the Gulf, furniture dealers flooded me with orders for my polish...
...Alien...
...Needed it in my business...
...It would be too long a story to tell why that scheme was not practical, to make clear imprints, and to do it fast enough to be commercially profitable...
...Never done anything: worthy particular mention...
...In 1897 I bought a $50,000 furniture factory in Michigan, and in April of the following year I had it in full swing, giving work to 180 employees...
...It was called "I Am Reminded...
...I met him on his homeward voyage, and he was so full of what he had seen that, at times, we had to lay him on his back to keep him from running over...
...It took a million of those booklets to satisfy the dealers to whom I gave them, with the polish...
...I resigned my position with this firm after five years and began the promoting of a furniture polish, and manufactured novelties to give away with it...
...I wrote that little story in the Livingston hotel in Grand Rapids one night, between the hours of 8 p. M. and 4 a. m., and by a coincidence I find myself in the same hotel today wiiting this letter...
...of your asking me if I could be induced to send you some sketches of my experiences on this trip, and my offer to do it...
...She told me, a little booklet that had been given her with a bottle of furniture polish by a furniture dealer in Indianapolis...
...Yes—farmed it for eight years...
...You ain't thinking of having those French walnut panels preached on that furniture, are you...
...There were times along in June, shortly before sundown that he almost won out, and then he would grin, but I resolved in my heart that, when I got big, I'd kill that man...
...George," the proprietor said to me the first day of the following January, "do you know how much you made last year?'' And he looked at me much as if I bad been robbing his hen roost...
...I'm jist goin' to tell folks to go and see for theirselves...
...And all the time that "Irish veneer" was sticking in my crop...
...On the 6th of that same April my plant burned down, just as we were starting our war with Spain...
...Well, I've never been in jail...
...On page twenty-four of that booklet, there was a picture of a man milking a Jersey cow, and under the picture these lines: While I'm milking my cow.— So...
...I held that job three years...
...He did me a good turn...
...WHAT TO DO...
...It looked so easy to do...
...That I made good and held the job, I've always attributed largely to that "ideal life" on the farm...
...I, with others throughout the country, had been £lled pretty full of tales about the tremendous resources of those islands, and I was particularly interested to investigate their timber...
...Lead pencils have to be printed one line at a time, stamped on, and you can't print in the manner you desire, rapidly around a circumference...
...I used the $1,000 I borrowed from my brother and the credit Bert Dickinson extended to me, together with the credit of some other houses, to start life over again...
...His mission in life Is to convince 80,000,000 people that they simply can't get along without his goods...
...I wanted it printed directly on the wood, a:.d varnished over the printing...
...On that same page was my picture, holding up a bottle of the stuff...
...We hope our family of readers will enjoy them...
...If the schedule couldn't be fixed up so I could make $1,400.00 a year that I would go out and look for experience, as that was what I seemed to lack in his estimation, and after I had got a sufficient amount, I might come back and ask him for a job...
...I'm no good at describing a sunset, likewise I know I'd fall down describing a storm at sea...
...From every English speaking country on the globe and even from some that were not English speaking, requests came for one of those little books that told about a fellow running a furniture factory, and, though twelve years have elapsed since they were published, requests still come for them...
...We think most folks like stories of travel...
...Having been fairly industrious at those "57 + Varieties" of work on the farm, the versatility thus gained caused me to remark one day to my fellow sand-paperers, in the hearing of one of the crack grainers, "That graining looks easy...
...Prior to my starting on this second trip to the Orient the boys made a deal with me to contribute to their "magazine...
...I finally mastered that so that three employees could coat five thousand of them in an hour...
...He is a wealthy manufacturer...
...If he hadn't cut that schedule down the chances are I would have been tempted to stay with the job...
...We used to get up at 3 A. M., to curry the horses, clean out the stables and milk the cows...
...But as I couldn't make any time milking while I was in the air—that's no good place to milk—I pointed out to him that it was a stand off—whether 1 took the time to strap her legs or dillydallied it away in aerial flights...
...He had the naming of committees on rules...
...He accepted it...
...Laugh and the world laughs with you...
...WHAT changes time hath wrought...
...That was nearly thirty years ago, and I haven't been back after that job—not yet, although I've accumulated quite a wad of experience...
...What's that got to do with it anyway...
...We were impressed with his originality and resourcefulness...
...All a man, woman or child has got to do to be a cousin of mine is to engage in the furniture business...
...There wasn't a whimper in it...
...That booklet seemed to take...
...I got a job on the road for a furniture manufacturing company, the house I started in with as a sand-paper boy, to carry their line between Williamsport, Pennsylvania and St...
...During my spare moments I had organized a little debating club, composed of some of the lads in the little town of Clinton...
...He submitted a schedule in which he had cut the rate about 30%—real, honest, downward revision of the tariff _on finishing cottage chamber suits...
...Say...
...Hit the high lights —no one wants the shadows...
...Louis, and held it down for three years, and putting "Irish veneer" on painted furniture, in painty overalls and blouse at even $1,400.00 a year, didn't appeal to me for a minute after I struck the road...
...He said he watt planning to make another tour of the world—his fifth—In the Interest of his business, during the coming summer...
...I had my picture taken in twenty-five attitudes, wrote my hard luck story in a little twenty-four page booklet, 3 1/2x6 inches, using fifteen of those photographs to illustrate it...
...Allen, You've sold enough.— Quit milking.—" So boss...
...She never seemed quite satisfied unless I struck those rafters hard and she could catch me again on the down trip...
...But the Idea worked...
...57 Varieties" conveys no idea of the number of different kinds of work to be done on a farm...
...I asked her what brand of furniture polish she got it with,—but before she had time to tell me, the best woman in the world spoiled the game...
...We convinced Mr...
...Oh wouldn't I, wouldn't I, now...
...Read what he says about himself and see If you don't think this man will have some interesting stories to tell after he gets started on his journey.—EDITOR'S NOTE...
...If a man isn't versatile after working eight of his adolescent years on a farm in Ohio— well, he hasn't improved his opportunities, that's all...
...I took my camera along and photographed the situation...
...I decided that a printing press especially designed for the work must be built, and I wrote the manufacturers of printing presses, explaining my troubles...
...That stuff sold...
...Yes," he said, "$1,200 a year...
...Copyright, 1910, The Robert M. La Follette My dear La Follette's: Feb...
...that I was worse off than nothing...
...The only variety there was to that shingle job was that some shingles were wider than others, or when the fiend in human shape (the man who worked the saw) would increase his ordinary gait, the object of said accelerated motion being to see if he couldn't bury the little cuss, under the saw, clear out of sight with the sawdust and shingles...
...After the cows were milked we ate breakfast by lamp-light so as to be ready to start our day's work by sun-up...
...I thought it such an easy matter to print the advertisement around the handle...
...460,172, "Device for printing on cylindrical forms...
...I had to have that press...
...You've proved it...
...We likewise convinced him that our offer was in the nature of a very profitable "side line" to carry on his journey...
...One of them read, "Why...
...I told him I was busted...
...Not a Word Painter YOU know of my visit with Senator La Follette in Washington, how I learned of your weekly magazine...
...I innocently asked her what she was reading...
...Their hoot of derision—"Pumpkin thinks he can grain...
...An idea struck us...
Vol. 2 • March 1910 • No. 9
