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No Gumption
Russell Baker
I began working in journalism when I was eight
years old. It was my mother's idea. She wanted me to "make
something" of myself and, after a levelheaded appraisal
of my strengths, decided I had better start young if I was
to have any chance of keeping up with the competition.
The flaw in my character which she had already spotted was
lack of "gumption." My idea of a perfect afternoon
was lying in front of the radio rereading my favorite
Big Little Book. Dick Tracy Meets Stooge Viller. My mother
despised inactivity. Seeing me having a good time in repose,
she was powerless to hide her disgust. "You've got no
more gumption than a bump on a log," she said. "Get
out in the kitchen and help Doris do those dirty dishes."
My sister Doris, though two years younger than I, had enough
gumption for a dozen people. She positively enjoyed washing
dishes, making beds, and cleaning the house. When she was
only seven she could carry a piece of short-weighted cheese
back to the A & P, threaten the manager with legal action,
and come back triumphantly with the full quarter-pound we'd
paid for and a few ounces extra thrown in for forgiveness.
Doris could have made something of herself if she hadn't been
a girl. Because of this defect, however, the best she could
hope for was a career as a nurse or schoolteacher, the only
work that capable females were considered up to in those days.
This must have saddened my mother, this twist of fate that
had allocated all the gumption to the daughter and left her
with a son who was content with Dick Tracy and Stooge Viller.
If disappointed, though, she wasted no energy on self-pity.
She would make me make something of myself whether I wanted
to or not. "The Lord helps those who help themselves,"
she said. That was the way her mind worked.
She was realistic about the difficulty. Having sized up the
material the Lord had given her to mold, she didn't overestimate
what she could do with it. She didn't insist that I grow up
to be President of the United States.
Fifty years ago parents still asked boys if they wanted to
grow up to be President, and asked it not jokingly but seriously.
Many parents who were hardly more than paupers still believed
their sons could do it. Abraham Lincoln had done it. We were
only sixty-five years from Lincoln. Many a grandfather who
walked among us could remember Lincoln's time. Men of grandfatherly
age were the worst for asking if you wanted to grow up to
be President. A surprising number of little boys said yes
and meant it.
I was asked many times myself. No, I would say, I didn't want
to grow up to be President. My mother was present during one
of those interrogations. An elderly uncle, having posed the
usual question and exposed my lack of interest in the Presidency,
asked, "Well, what do you want to be when you grow up?"
I loved to pick through trash piles and collect empty bottles,
tin cans with pretty labels, and discarded magazines. The
most desirable job on earth sprang instantly to mind. "I
want to be a garbage man," I said.
My uncle smiled, but mother had seen first distressing evidence
of a bump budding on a log. "Have a little gumption.
Russell," she said. Her calling me Russell was a signal
of unhappiness. When she approved of me I was always "Buddy."
When I turned eight years old she decided that the job of
starting me on the road toward making something of myself
could no longer be safely delayed. "Bully," she
said one day, "I want you to come home right after school
this afternoon. Somebody's coming and I want you to meet him."
When I burst in that afternoon she was in conference in the
parlor with an executive of the Curtis Publishing Company.
She introduced me. He bent low from the waist and shook my
hand. Was it true as my mother had told him, he asked, that
I longed for the opportunity to conquer the world of business?
My mother replied that I was blessed with a rare determination
to make something of myself.
"That's right," I whispered.
"But have you got the grit, the character, the never-say-quit
spirit it takes to succeed in business?"
My mother said I certainly did.
"That's right," I said.
He eyed me silently for a long pause, as though weighing whether
I could be trusted to keep his confidence, then spoke man-to-man.
Before taking a crucial step, he said, he wanted to advise
me that working for the Curtis Publishing Company placed enormous
responsibility on a young man. It was one of the great companies
of America. Perhaps the greatest publishing house in the world.
I had heard, no doubt, of the Saturday Evening Post.
Heard of it? My mother said that everyone in our house had
heard of the Saturday Evening Post and that I, in fact, read
it with religious devotion.
Then doubtless, we were also familiar with those two monthly
pillars of the magazine world, the Ladies Home Journal
and the Country Gentleman.
Indeed we were familiar with them, said my mother.
Representing the Saturday Evening Post was weightiest honors
that could be bestowed in the world of business, he said.
He was personally proud of being a part of that great corporation.
My mother said he had every right to be.
Again he studied me as though debating whether I was worthy
of a knighthood. Finally: "Are you trustworthy?"
My mother said I was the soul of honesty.
"That's right," I said.
The caller smiled for the first time. He told me I was a lucky
young man. He admired my spunk. Too many young men thought
life was all play. Those young men would not go far in this
world. Only a young man willing to work and save and keep
his face washed and his hair neatly combed could hope to come
out on top in a world such as ours. Did I truly and sincerely
believe that I was such a young man?
"He certainly does," said my mother.
"That's right," I said.
He said he had been so impressed by what he had seen of me
that he was going to make me a representative of the Curtis
Publishing Company. On the following Tuesday, he said, thirty
freshly printed copies of the Saturday Evening Post would
by delivered at our door. I would place these magazines, still
damp with the ink of the presses, in a handsome canvas bag,
sling it over my shoulder, and set forth through the streets
to bring the best in journalism, fiction, and cartoons to
the American public.
He had brought the canvas bag with him. He presented it with
reverence fit for a chasuble. He showed me how to drape the
sling over my left shoulder and across the chest so that the
pouch lay easily accessible to my right hand, allowing the
best in journalism, fiction, and cartoons to be swiftly extracted
and sold to a citizenry whose happiness and security depended
upon us soldiers of the free press.
The following Tuesday I raced home from school, put the canvas
bag over my shoulder, dumped the magazines in, and, tilting
to the lift to balance their weight on my right hip, embarked
in the highway of journalism.
We lived in Belleville, New Jersey, a commuter town at the
northern fringe of Newark. It was 1932, the bleakest year
of the Depression. My father had died two years before, leaving
us with a few pieces of Sears, Roebuck furniture and not much
else, and my mother had taken Doris and me to live with one
of her younger brothers. This was my Uncle Allen. Uncle Allen
had made something of himself by 1932. As salesman for a soft-drink
bottler in Newark, he had an income of $30 a week: and took
in threadbare relatives.
With my load of magazines I headed toward Belleville Avenue.
That's where the people were. There were two filling stations
at the intersection with Union Avenue, as well as an A &
P, a fruit stand, a bakery, a barber shop, Zuccarelli's drugstore,
and a diner shaped like a railroad car. For several hours
I made myself highly visible, shifting position now and then
from corner to corner, from shop window to shop window, to
make sure everyone could see the heavy black lettering on
the canvas bag that said The Saturday Evening Post.
When the angle of the light indicated it was suppertime, I
walked back to the house.
"How many did you sell, Buddy?" my mother asked.
"None."
"Where did you go?"
"The corner of Belleville and Union Avenues."
"What did you do?"
"Stood on the corner waiting for somebody to buy a
Saturday Evening Post."
"You just stood there?"
"Didn't sell a single one."
"For God's sake, Russell!"
Uncle Allen intervened. "I've been thinking about it
for some time," he said, "and I've about decided
to take the Post regularly. Put me down as a regular
customer." I handed him a magazine and he paid me a nickel.
It was the first nickel I earned.
Afterwards my mother instructed me in salesmanship. I would
have to ring doorbells, address adults with charming self-confidence,
and break down resistance with a sales talk pointing out that
no one, no matter how poor, could afford to be without the
Saturday Evening Post in the home.
I told my mother I'd changed my mind about wanting to succeed
in the magazine business.
"If you think I'm going to raise a good-for-nothing,"
she replied, "you've got another think coming."
She told me to hit the streets with the canvas bag and start
ringing doorbells the instant school was out next day. When
I objected that I didn't feel any aptitude for salesmanship,
she asked how I'd like to lend her my leather belt so she
could whack some sense into me. I bowed to superior will and
entered journalism with a heavy heart.
My mother and I had fought this battle almost as long as I
could remember. It probably started even before memory began,
when I was a country child in northern Virginia and my mother,
dissatisfied with my father's plain workman's life, determined
that I would not grow up like him and his people, with calluses
on their hands, overalls on their backs, and fourth-grade
educations in their heads. She had fancier ideas of life's
possibilities. Introducing me to the Saturday Evening
Post, she was trying to wean me as early as possible from
my father's world where men left with their lunch pails at
sunup, worked with their hands until the grime ate into the
pores, and died with a few sticks of mail-order furniture
as their legacy. In my mother's vision of the better life
there were desks and white collars, well-pressed suits, evenings
of reading and lively talk, and perhaps—if a man were very,
very lucky and hit the jackpot, really made something important
of himself—perhaps there might be a fantastic salary of
$5,000 a year to support a big house and a Buick with a rumble
seat and a vacation in Atlantic City.
And so I set forth with my sack of magazines. I was afraid
of the dogs that snarled behind the doors of potential buyers.
I was timid about ringing the doorbells of strangers, relieved
when no one came to the door, and scared when someone did.
Despite my mother's instructions, I could not deliver an engaging
sales pitch. When a door opened I simply asked, "Want
to buy a Saturday Evening Post?" In Belleville
few persons did. It was a town of 30,000 people, and most
weeks I rang a fair majority of its doorbells. But I rarely
sold my thirty copies. Some weeks I walked around the entire
town for six days and still had four or five unsold magazines
on Monday evening; then I dreaded the coming of Tuesday morning,
when a batch of thirty fresh Saturday Evening Posts was due
at the front door.
"Better get out there and sell the rest of those magazines
tonight," my mother would say.
I usually posted myself then at a busy intersection where
a traffic light controlled commuter flow from Newark. When
the light turned red I stood on the curb and shouted my sales
pitch at the motorists.
"Want to buy a Saturday Evening Post?"
One rainy night when car windows were sealed against me I
came back soaked and with not a single sale to report. My
mother beckoned to Doris.
"Go back down there with Buddy and show him how to sell
these magazines," she said.
Brimming with zest, Doris, who was then seven years old, returned
with me to the corner. She took a magazine from the bag, and
when the light turned red she strode to the nearest car and
banged her small fist against the closed window, the driver,
probably startled at what he took to be a midget assaulting
his car, lowered the window to stare, and Doris thrust a
Saturday Evening Post at him.
"You need this magazine," she piped, "and it
only costs a nickel."
Her salesmanship was irresistible. Before the light had changed
half a dozen times she disposed of the entire batch. I didn't
feel humiliated. To the contrary, I was so happy I decided
to give her a treat. Leading her to the vegetable store on
Belleville Avenue, I bought three apples, which cost a nickel,
and gave her one.
"You shouldn't waste money," she said.
"Eat your apple." I bit into mine.
"You shouldn't eat before supper," she said. "It'll
spoil your appetite."
Back at the house that evening, she dutifully reported me
for wasting a nickel. Instead of a scolding, I was rewarded
with a pat on the back for having the good sense to buy fruit
instead of candy. My mother reached into her bottomless supply
of maxims and told Doris, "An apple a day keeps the doctor
away."
By the time I was ten I had learned all my mother's maxims
by heart. Asking to stay up past normal bedtime, I knew that
a refusal would be explained with, "Early to bed and
early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."
If I whimpered about having to get up early in the morning,
I could depend on her to say, "The early bird gets the
worm."
The one I most despised was, "If at first you don't succeed,
try, try again." This was the battle cry with which she
constantly sent me back into the hopeless struggle whenever
I moaned that I had rung every doorbell in town and knew there
wasn't a single potential buyer left in Belleville that week.
After listening to my explanation, she handed me the canvas
bag and said, "If at first you don't succeed..."
Three years in that job, which I would gladly have quit after
the first day except for her insistence, produced at least
one valuable result. My mother finally concluded that I would
never make something of myself by pursuing a life in business
and started considering careers that demanded less competitive
zeal.
One evening when I was eleven I brought home a short "composition"
on my summer vacation which the teacher had graded with an
A. Reading it with her own schoolteacher's eye, my mother
agreed that it was top-drawer seventh grade prose and complimented
me. Nothing more was said about it immediately, but a new
idea had taken life in her mind. Halfway through supper she
suddenly interrupted the conversation.
"Buddy," she said, "maybe you could be a writer."
I clasped the idea to my heart. I had never met a writer,
had shown no previous urge to write, and hadn't a notion how
to become a writer, but I loved stories and thought that making
up stories must surely be almost as much fun as reading them.
Best of all, though, and what really gladdened my heart, was
the ease of the writer's life. Writers did not have to trudge
through the town peddling from canvas bags, defending themselves
against angry dogs, being rejected by surly strangers. Writers
did not have to ring doorbells. So far as I could make out,
what writers did couldn't even be classified as work.
I was enchanted. Writers didn't have to have any gumption
at all. I did not dare tell anybody for fear of being laughed
at in the schoolyard, but secretly I decided that what I'd
like to be when I grew up was a writer.
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