Further Foolishness, Stephen Leacock [pdf ebook reader .TXT] 📗

on that. I never spent any money anyway. I went once to see Irving do this Macbeth for twenty-five cents, and once I went to a concert and saw a man play the violin for fifteen cents in the gallery. But I don't believe you get much out of the theatre anyway; as I see it, there's nothing to it.

Well, after a while I went one day to Mr. Evans's office and I said, "Mr. Evans, I want you to dismiss Mr. Thompson, the general manager." "Why, what's he done?" he says. "Nothing," I said, "but I can take over his job on top of mine and you can pay me the salary you give him and save what you're paying me now." "Sounds good to me," he says.

So they let Thompson go and I took his place. That, of course, is where I got my real start, because, you see, I could control the output and run the costs up and down just where I liked. I suppose you don't know anything about costs and all that—they don't teach that sort of thing in colleges—but even you would understand something about dividends and would see that an energetic man with lots of character and business in him, If he's general manager can just do what he likes with the costs, especially the overhead, and the shareholders have just got to take what he gives them and be glad to. You see they can't fire him—not when he's got it all in his own hands—for fear it will all go to pieces.

Why would I want to run it that way for? Well, I'll tell you. I had a notion by that time that the business was getting so big that Mr. Evans, the managing director, and most of the board had pretty well lost track of the details and didn't understand it. There's an awful lot, you know, in the shoe business. It's not like ordinary things. It's complicated. And so I'd got an idea that I would shove them clean out of it—or most of them.

So I went one night to see the president, old Guggenbaum, up at his residence. He didn't only have this business, but he was in a lot of other things as well, and he was a mighty hard man to see. He wouldn't let any man see him unless he knew first what he was going to say. But I went up to his residence at night, and I saw him there. I talked first with his daughter, and I said I just had to see him. I said it so she didn't dare refuse. There's a way in talking to women that they won't say no.

So I showed Mr. Guggenbaum what I could do with the stock. "I can put that dividend," I says, "clean down to zero—and they'll none of them know why. You can buy the lot of them out at your own price, and after that I'll put the dividend back to fifteen, or twenty, in two years."

"And where do you come in?" says the old man, with a sort of hard look. He had a fine business head, the old man, at least in those days.

So I explained to him where I came in. "All right," he said. "Go ahead. But I'll put nothing in writing." "Mr. Guggenbaum, you don't need to," I said. "You're as fair and square as I am and that's enough for me."

His daughter let me out of the house door when I went. I guess she'd been pretty scared that she'd done wrong about letting me in. But I said to her it was all right, and after that when I wanted to see the old man I'd always ask for her and she'd see that I got in all right.

Got them squeezed out? Oh, yes, easy. There wasn't any trouble about that. You see the old man worked up a sort of jolt in wholesale leather on one side, and I fixed up a strike of the hands on the other. We passed the dividend two quarters running, and within a year we had them all scared out and the bulk of the little shareholders, of course, trooped out after them. They always do. The old man picked up the stock when they dropped it, and one-half of it he handed over to me.

That's what put me where I am now, do you see, with the whole control of the industry in two states and more than that now, because we have the Amalgamated Tanneries in with us, so it's practically all one concern.

Guggenbaum? Did I squeeze him out? No, I didn't because, you see, I didn't have to. The way it was—well, I tell you—I used to go up to the house, see, to arrange things with him—and the way it was—why, you see, I married his daughter, see, so I didn't exactly need to squeeze him out. He lives up with us now, but he's pretty old and past business. In fact, I do it all for him now, and pretty well everything he has is signed over to my wife. She has no head for it, and she's sort of timid anyway —always was—so I manage it all. Of course, if anything happens to the old man, then we get it all. I don't think he'll last long. I notice him each day, how weak he's getting.

My son in the business? Well, I'd like him to be. But he don't seem to take to it somehow—I'm afraid he takes more after his mother; or else it's the college that's doing it. Somehow, I don't think the colleges bring out business character, do you?