What Makes the Wheels Go Round

by ARNOLD GINGRICH

RECENTLY I had a letter from a young fellow, just out of college last June, complaining about the “miserable wage” he was being paid in his first job after graduation. The job in question pays — or rather, paid, as he has since quit it for a better one — $56.25 a week. Over forty years ago, in the summer of 1925, I felt the same way about the measly “wages” being offered for first jobs after graduation. But my problem had an extra complication in that I had to earn a particular sum weekly.

This problem was posed by my then mother-inlaw, who didn’t know that she was my then motherin-law, My first wife and I, having been married while we were both in school, hadn’t had the nerve to tell her mother about it. So my then mother-inlaw thought that she was, at worst, my prospective mother-in-law, and she wasn’t too happy about that. She stipulated that before she would allow us to marry, I must get a job paying fifty dollars a week. In the summer of 1925 that seemed to be a height so redoubtable as to be virtually unscalable to a kid just out of college. However, I resolved to try to land such a job.

Everywhere I went that summer in Chicago my prospective employers were most affable, until I reached that point in our interview when I had to disclose the fact that I couldn’t work for less than fifty dollars a week.

The thing I got told then ran to this effect: “Go get a job somewhere else and then come back, when you can at least say you’ve had some experience, and then we’ll talk about paying anything like fifty dollars a week.”

Among the many places I was told that same story was the Osten Advertising Agency on West Jackson Boulevard. Mr. Osten, an amiable if harried-looking man of late middle age — I suppose he was in his fifties, but to me, hardly into my twenties, he looked older than God — was quite obviously in great need of a copywriter. He was willing to pay me up to thirty-five dollars a week to take the job, and even showed me the finished layouts, waiting for copy to be written, that would be my first work. There were ads for Green River, a prohibition-time soft drink, and Haddon Hall Ginger Ale, and I remember thinking they would be fun to work on. But the same old hurdle kept us apart, and I went on to another half-dozen hirings and firings, until it finally dawned on me that I was wasting my breath trying to talk my way into any fifty-dollar-a-week job.

So I went back to Mr. Osten and asked him if he still had those layouts lying around waiting for copy. When he said he did, I took off my hat and coat, and rolling up my sleeves, said I was going to work on them for nothing.

“But you can’t do that,” he said. He couldn’t have appeared more shocked.

“Why can’t I?” I said. “I’ve got to get fifty dollars a week because of my peculiar problem that I told you about, but I can see now that I’ll never get a job at anything like that kind of money unless I have some experience first, and that’s where you come in. All I ask you to do,” I told him, “is let me use your address and your stationery while I go on looking for a job. And if my work’s half as good as I think it is, I expect you to say so when somebody asks you about it after I’ve given your name for a reference. I have a hunch that what I’m after is a second job that I’ll never get unless I have a first job to go to it from. So that’s what this is, my first job. That’s why I’m doing it for nothing, though I promise you I’d be cheap at twice the price.”

I SET to work and cleared up all the layouts waiting for copy like a housewife doing the dishes, and then after that did a lot more besides.

At that it was a fairly daring gesture on my part because I was living on three leftover buns a day which I got from a Clark Street bakery for a dime, and had been for over a week, since spending half of my last ten dollars on a George Moore book I specially wanted. My place of residence was a ramshackle and makeshift room adjacent to a coal heap in a cellar, for which I had promised to pay two fifty a week whenever I got a job.

Osten had a layout man, S. L. Huntley, a Texan who as a sideline was developing a comic strip called Mescal Ike, which was later accepted by the Chicago Daily News. By way of warming up the Daily News to be receptive to his strip, he was indefatigably contributing funny items to their daily humor column, at that time run by Keith Preston. When he learned that I was contributing my services to Osten without pay he was not at all surprised, pointing out that in effect he was doing the same thing, working much harder on the things he was devising for nothing for Keith Preston’s column than he was on the layouts he was doing for Osten for pay.

Huntley was the first professionally funny man I ever knew, although at that time he was still only a semi-pro. But though I knew many others afterward, they were without exception dour fellows, with a dyspeptic outlook generally, and the funnier they were professionally, the more dour they were in person. But Huntley was funny for nothing, for his own amusement, before he began being well paid to be funny for others.

Nights when we were walking up Michigan Avenue after work, above the Art Institute, he would stop at an intersection where people were waiting for buses. Stepping up to any two who were standing next to each other, he would put a hand on the shoulder of each and say, “Mr. Zelosky, shake hands with Mr. Moholy.”

The two would reach and shake hands, before turning to look at, or for, their introducer, who by that time would have fallen back in step with me, proceeding upstreet in the crowd. Looking back at them, we would see Mr. Zelosky explaining rather sheepishly to Mr. Moholy that his name really wasn’t Zelosky at all, thus interrupting Mr. Moholy, who was trying to explain the same thing, and invariably they would each look at their own hands as if they’d never seen them before. They always gave every indication, though, that they were going to go on talking to each other, at least until the bus came, and by that time Huntley might have introduced two or three more pairs of perfect strangers.

My hunch paid off before my money gave out: I had suspected that agencies often got letters asking for their help in filling jobs, and before long Huntley tossed me a letter and said, “Here, this is what you’re looking for.”

At first, I didn’t think it was, and he had to reassure me. It was on the letterhead of Rock Products, beneath the logotype of which there was a subhead reading “The Journal of the Non-Metallic Mineral Industries,” and it was signed “W. D. Callendar, Pres.” What it said, in substance, was that they were looking for somebody to head up their advertising service department, and that the man they wanted must be one who knew “what makes the wheels go round.” They weren’t sure, it went on, whether such a man should be called an engineering advertiser or an advertising engineer because, in effect, he had to be both, to translate into language that an ordinary businessman, such as a purchasing agent, could understand the highly technical details of the machines and appliances used in the industry their journal served.

“Oh, Jesus, no,” I said. “I’m a mathematical moron, I wouldn’t know the first thing about a job like that.”

“The hell you wouldn’t,” said Huntley; “you know what makes the wheels go round. They have a little dingus called an axle, and they go round on that, and that’s all there is to it.”

“I wish it were,” I said, “but I’m sure there’s a lot more to it than that. Why, I don’t even know how to use a slide rule, and it says right here that the stuff they deal in is highly technical.”

“Well, suit yourself,” said Huntley, “but if I were you, before I’d pass it up, I’d at least look at the place. See, it says 542 South Dearborn. Hell, that’s just around the corner. What can it hurt to take ten minutes to go case the joint, and you might get some idea of just how highly technical it really is. Somehow that letter sounds to me like the work of a bull artist — you know, one cut above a con man — whether he’s an engineer or not. Besides, Osten can’t dock you, you know.”

“I’m afraid he might not be able to give me much of a send-off, either, for an engineering job.”

“Aw, the hell with Osten. How do they know if there even is an Osten? Tell them I’m the boss here, and if it comes to that, you can refer them to me. I’ll tell ‘em you’re a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech, and a hell of an engineer. Go on, git.”

WHEN I got to the place, it was a mob scene. Osten’s must have been the last place to get the circular letter. Or perhaps there had been an ad in some paper that I hadn’t seen, though I had scanned every edition of Chicago’s then seven separate papers and had seen no ad referring even indirectly to anything like an engineering advertiser or an advertising engineer. The entrance hall was packed almost solid with apparent applicants for the job, though I was able to squirm my way through far enough to see that inside there was no line. In the center of a large open office, with desks like headstones in a cemetery, was one glassed-in office, outside which sat two men waiting, while apparently a third was being interviewed within. So the deal seemed to be that they were knocking this crowd off three at a time.

I decided to circulate among the applicants, and stopping to ask one for a match, and another for the time, and aided by the turbulence in the outer office from seeming to be too obvious about it, I managed before long to elicit the information that not one of the applicants was really an engineer. Their one common denominator seemed to be that they all claimed to be “sorta innarested in things like that.”

This gave me an idea, and f went back to Osten’s to pick up the telephone and see if I could get to talk to Mr. Callendar while his interviewing was still going on. Surprisingly, I could, so after identifying myself only as the Osten Advertising Agency, and telling him that I was calling him about his letter looking for an engineering advertiser, I said that I hoped to be able to save him some time because I had taken the trouble to find out, with the possible exception of a couple who were waiting outside his office while I was there, that there was not a single engineer among all the couple of dozen other applicants for the job who were then waiting to see him in the outer office.

“That interests me very much,” he said. “In fact, I’d like to meet the man who thought of finding that out.”

Nothing could be easier, I assured him, except that the man in question was very busy, and couldn’t possibly get away before five thirty or, if that would be too late, during the noon hour the next day.

“No, no,” he cut in, “this is very important to me. I’ll make it a point to be here after five thirty, though I’m usually not here much after four.”

So I let him wait until quarter of six, by which time he was alone in his central glassed-in pavilion, where the lights still burned, the rest of the office and the outer anteroom all having had theirs extinguished. He called to me to come on in from the outer office, telling me how to press the latch to let myself through the gate in the waist-high railing that separated it from the main room.

My story to him was brief but I thought calculated to be appealing. I was, in short, that man he was looking for, call him what you will, advertising engineer or engineering advertiser, but I was now, alas, out of my natural element, like a fish out of water, because I was now beached, as it were, high and dry in a desert of consumer goods, having to write advertising for things like soft drinks and perfumes, whereas all my instincts and all my interests — well, being an engineer himself he could no doubt imagine how a job such as the one he had so aptly described in his witty letter must appear to the likes of me to be a veritable oasis, a promised land —

“I certainly hope it doesn’t turn out to be a mirage,” he said, “and not what you’re looking for at all. But you flatter me,” he added. “I’m not an engineer. I was denied the advantages of a college education” — he didn’t add the “unlike you,” but a slight pause intimated it as clearly as if he had spelled it out — “I had to hoe my own row, starting out as a salesman.”

I thought he looked more like a drummer than any engineer should, though what he really resembled in style and manner was a Norman Rockwell drawing of a barker or spieler outside a carnival or sideshow at a county fair. But this was wonderful, I thought, for if he wasn’t an engineer himself, how could he possibly tell for sure whether I was or not.

“I can see you’re not a hen, too,” I told him, “but I’m sure you’re a better judge of an omelet than any hen that ever clucked.”

“Heh, heh, very well put,” he chuckled. “Young man, I like your way of saying things, and your way of doing things, too, if I can judge by the way you found out I was wasting my time with all those other applicants. There’s only one thing that worries me about the possibility of our getting together on this proposition.”

He paused and looked at me, owlishly. Here it comes, I thought, here’s where he asks me for proof I’m an engineer, and that’s when the pipe goes out. But no, not another word on that score. He went on, “The emolument of this position is only fifty dollars a week.” I gulped.

“Well,” I began, wondering just how disappointed I dared try to look, or indeed was expected to look, since he had prefaced the magic number with an “only,” and also wondering how big a lie I could tell without actually lying, “the work I’m doing now would figure out, at the lowest of piecework rates, to better than sixty-five dollars a week” — he looked suddenly pained at the mention of this sum, as if I’d pinched him — “but the money doesn’t matter so much” — and now suddenly the sun was out again, and he was all smiles — “it’s the kind of work I get to do that counts the most.”

He jumped up and began pumping my hand up and down, just like a tennis player after leaping the net at the sight of the ball dropping in for the deciding point of a hard-fought match: “Well, young man, put ‘er there! That’s the kind of talk I like to hear.”

I almost keeled over backward in surprise. My god, I was hired, it seemed. It was like a door opening too easily that you thought was stuck, sending you sprawling headlong after your mighty effort to thrust it open. It occurred to me that whatever happened, they would undoubtedly have to give me two weeks pay when they threw me out, and that meant that I could expect to have a hundred dollars in my pocket. That was enough to keep me in day-old buns for almost three years, though the fact had also to be faced that the landlady would someday want something for all those weeks that, at two fifty a week, would in all probability elapse before I’d find another job at fifty dollars a week.

Callendar, having made his score for the day, was suddenly in a hurry. But I had my own reasons for hoping that the interview would now end quickly. I was afraid he still might ask me to prove that I was an engineer. Now that I felt that I was at least into him for a hundred dollars, I didn’t want to say another word.

AS A matter of fact, we didn’t exchange another word for almost a year thereafter. The next day I met the engineers, Nathan C. Rockwood and Edmund Shaw, who as editor and managing editor respectively actually handled all the highly technical matter that went into their journal of the nonmetallic mineral industries, but I didn’t meet my own immediate boss, Charles Breskin, the advertising manager, who with his staff of space salesmen was responsible for the sale of the advertisements in Rock Products, as he was away on an Eastern trip.

Rockwood and Shaw were both New Englanders, the former about sixty and the latter pushing seventy, but while Rockwood looked like one of the bearded Smith Brothers on the cough drop packages, Shaw looked more like the provisional president of one of the banana republics, with drooping white mustaches, an almost Negroid swarthiness in startling contrast to his white hair, and sleepy eyes above a perpetually smoldering cigarette. Around the eyes, I was much later to realize, he was almost a dead ringer for the French statesman Pierre Laval.

Neither of them asked me if I was an engineer, but it must have been evident to both of them, within a matter of seconds, that I wasn’t.

I made only two bad mistakes in my first weeks of writing the ads for Rock Products. Noon hours I would rush up the street to the Monadnock Building, where I could use the library of the Society of Western Engineers to look up all the unfamiliar technical terms that bothered me, but like the bad speller who misspells only the easy words because he has to look up all the hard ones in the dictionary, I came a cropper only on two things that were too elementary for me to be able to find in the technical works to which I had such easy if furtive access.

One was an ad for screens, where I made the mistake of assuming that all they did was act like a sieve in sizing the stones that they allowed to fall through their apertures. I failed to figure out that as rotary screens they exercised a cleansing function at the same time. But that was a minor error, soon corrected when the advertiser sent the ad back with a brief notation to that effect scribbled in its margin.

But my other mistake was a lulu, and I had a hard time crawling out of it. In the only folder I could find to give me anything to go on for an ad I had to write about an overhead crane, a huge elaborate thing for big cement factories, it mentioned headroom, but in such a way that I could get no idea of what a headroom was, or where it was, or what you did in it.

Since in all these ads I took the attitude that the duller the subject matter the livelier must be the copy and art, I proceeded to fasten on this headroom, whatever it was, as the thing to jazz up and make appealing.

So I had happier workers, beaming like contented cows, and pleased production managers, chortling over charts showing increased production, and everything short of the king in his countinghouse, counting out his money, to show how life was in flower all over the giant cement plant, and all this serenity was presumably rampant only because of the marvelous new headroom in this wonderful new crane.

Today, I suppose any cretin who has ever ridden under an overpass, where the amount of headroom is clearly marked, would know that headroom is merely an amount of clearance. But I didn’t know it, and when the angry advertiser sent back the copy, saying it was a poor joke that must have been perpetrated either by a hopeless idiot or a helpless drunk, it was very nearly my downfall. For the layout and copy were returned, not to me, but to Charles Breskin, the advertising manager, under whom I was only a straw boss.

Fortunately, Mr. Breskin was away, not still but again, as I had met him in the interim and even been complimented by him on my work. He had been enthusiastic, about my first attempts to brighten up these trade paper ads for highly specialized products by giving them some of the same type of appeal that had customarily been confined to consumer ads for goods of a more general kind, and had offered me only one specific suggestion.

“When you sign your letters sending out these ads,” he said, “always be sure to close with ‘Cordially yours.’ I notice you sometimes only say ‘Sincerely.’ That’s no good. People don’t give a damn whether you’re sincere or not, as long as you’re telling them something they like to hear. Everybody likes to be treated cordially, and sometimes they’ll even think they are when they aren’t, just because you say they are.”

So now I remembered this and answered the letter of complaint, most cordially, for Mr. Breskin in his absence, assuring the offended advertiser that he would personally supervise the preparation of all future ads for them and putting the blame for this ghastly error on a misguided practical joker, a disgruntled copywriter who, having left our employ by a request that was not his own, had sought to sabotage the place by sending out “a few of these supposedly funny ads” before he left. I thought while I was at it, if I could just get onto the record the possibility that there might have been more than one such ad, I might be covering up more tracks than I was aware of having left, on the chance that other mistakes might turn up to haunt me. I was careful in signing Mr. Breskin’s name beneath the “Cordially yours” to make it “per” two undecipherable initials.

This letter was attached to another ad, to replace the one that had caused all the trouble, and thus by implication the new ad had been personally supervised by Mr. Breskin.

Back came an even more cordial letter, thanking Mr. Breskin for his personal attention to the matter, and there were never any more complaints.

So deeply was I impressed by the injunction to sign everything “Cordially yours” that for forty years and more thereafter I have never signed a letter that was concluded any other way without a momentary twinge of guilt, and the sneaky feeling of fear that even now Mr. Breskin might find me out.

CHARLES BRESKIN went on in later years to found his own magazine, Modern Packaging, which still exists, though I have never seen its name in print without marveling that he didn’t call it Cordial Packaging, in view of how he felt about the power of that magic adjective.

But though I stayed there over a year, relations between Mr. Callendar and me were never again anywhere near as cordial as they had been that first night when he hired me. Word got back to him somehow that I was no more an engineer than he was, and though Rockwood and Shaw and Breskin all reassured him repeatedly that my department was running better than it ever had before, he still squirmed under the feeling that he had been outsmarted. So there was no raise for me at Christmastime when everybody else got one, including the girl at the switchboard and the little old guy who wrapped packages.

Though Mr. Callendar had never said a word to me, only blinking at me balefully from where he sat twiddling his thumbs and looking halfasleep whenever I was unable to avoid passing his office, I now felt sure enough of myself to march in boldly and ask him how come no raise, just like that.

“Because your department is overhead,” he said, “and the thing to do with overhead is — keep it down”; and he made a brisk downward motion with his right thumb. “Everything’s overhead except Sales.”

I was hoping to get a word in, to the effect that all the rest of this overhead had been given a raise at Christmastime, but the mere mention of the word Sales seemed to set him off, practically genuflecting every time he mentioned sales or salesmen, reminding me that he had been a salesman himself; and as he headed into a peroration on the importance and power of sales and salesmen, not only there, where he sat and I stood at the moment, but throughout our entire economy, it dawned on me that he was not only dead set against me but that he was also rather more than half drunk, and that if I didn’t get out of there gracefully and quickly, he might very well end up firing me.

So I thanked him, at the first moment I could possibly interrupt, for making the situation so clear, and headed for the door as I did so.

Back in the advertising service department, I told Don Paeth, our art director, the gist of the discussion and he was sympathetic, although he had received a raise himself. I had noticed one thing while I was in Callendar’s office that had given me an idea. On a worktable behind his desk was a large map of the country, in which he had placed pushpins of different colors, like a battle map, each of which seemed to stand for a different salesman. There were no pins either in the Southwest or anywhere on the Coast, and I asked Paeth if that meant there were no salesmen in either of those territories. He said he was pretty sure there weren’t. Earnshaw was in the South, Alter in the Middle West, Breskin himself took care of the East — he named them all off, and agreed that so far as he knew, and he’d been there for years, there never had been any salesmen that far away.

SO NOW I had something new to go up to the Monadnock Building for on my lunch hours. In the library of the Society of Western Engineers, where I had managed to prevent all but a few of the many mistakes I might otherwise have made, by means of fairly elementary research, I now had a new project, to study up on the names and products of firms in the Southwest or on the West Coast which might conceivably be prospects for space in Rock Products, and see if I could sell some ads by mail. I found three, and with the junior artist’s help, in consideration of a few dinners I bought him when we worked nights, got together a campaign for each of them.

One was a blank, never even acknowledging receipt of the proposed ads I had sent. The second was a modest success, resulting in the placement of a contract for three half-page ads. That was well short of the miraculous, though there were salesmen on the staff who had sold less than that in the previous six months. But the third was the jackpot. It was a direct tap on a mother lode. It brought in an order for twelve fullpage ads in full color, something that had never happened before. There wasn’t even a rate for fullcolor pages, and we had to get the printer to figure one out.

All unwittingly, it seemed, I had presented the Nordstrom Valve Company, out on the Coast, with a campaign for an industry they had never previously served but had just decided to enter. They didn’t think anybody knew of their plans in this respect, and were dumbfounded to receive a campaign trumpeting forth the virtues of a product they had only just finished perfecting and didn’t know anybody knew anything about.

In that, of course, they were right. I didn’t know a damn thing about them or their products, and had only assumed that what they had would work in our industry or that they wouldn’t want the ads saying it did.

The first reverberation was when a long-distance call came in for me from one of their vice presidents, wanting to know where we had obtained the information on which the ads were apparently based. When he heard that it was “just a hunch,” he clearly couldn’t believe it. It was probably the first call ever received from such a distance, as our salesmen were not permitted even to telegraph, let alone telephone, except in the direst of emergency plights.

Within the week, the official who had called up was there in person, and the space contract was an accomplished fact. The size of the order represented more business than the entire sales staff had obtained all together in a month, and more than, with the single exception of Breskin, any had obtained in three months. As an occasion in the annals of Rock Products, it called for dancing in the aisles.

But although Callendar always wrote encouraging and applauding comments on all the salesmen’s space-order cards as they passed over his desk, with plaudits like “Keep up the good work” and “Bravo” even for insertion orders calling for one-eighthor one-quarter-page ads, when both my space-order cards went through, the one calling for three half pages and the other for an incredible twelve in full color, both cards came back with nothing but a scribbled initialing, which was in fact mandatory before they could be further processed, of the three letters “WDC.”

After that, he had a near-mutiny on his hands, as both Rock wood and Breskin pleaded with him for some recognition of my efforts to bring some new business into the place. Finally, Breskin the salesman succeeded, where Rockwood the editor had failed, in getting him to promise to give me a raise. He did, too, in the very next paycheck: a raise of five dollars — per month. It worked out to about a dollar thirty-three cents a week.

FOR the first time in over a year, I turned to the want-ad pages again, and answered an ad for a copywriter at B. Kuppenheimer & Co. Remembering how well my fish-out-of-water routine had gone over in getting this first job, I now turned the record over and played its other side in presenting myself for this second job. I was a clothing copywriter, had written clothing ads in college (that part just did happen to be true), and I was now stuck in a place where I had to write about steam shovels and cranes, and oh, how wonderful it would be to get back to my natural bent. This time, though, I intimated that the work I was now doing was worth every penny of the sixty-five I let them think I was getting, since that had worked so well the year before; I even went so far as to suggest that because of my great interest in writing about clothing, I would be willing to work for as much as five dollars less, because, falling into the old refrain, the money didn’t matter so much — it was exactly the same deal as last time, only this time played, as it were, in a different suit.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to take the implied cut that I had had the temerity to suggest, but got the whole sixty-five that I had hinted at but not quite dared to come out and ask for openly.

I was now set to go back and thank Mr. Callendar for the raise. I did this with a surprise handshake, much the same way as he had surprised me with a sudden handshake by way of reaching a conclusion in our first interview the year before. I reached down and grabbed his hand, although he was seated and hadn’t got up out of his chair when I walked into his office. Holding his hand, I began pumping it vigorously up and down, refusing to let go of it, and punctuating my remarks with an added, extra vigorous pump, until he began to look as though he feared I was going to hit him with the other hand. But always mindful of Breskin’s admonition, I made my remarks cordial.

“Mr. Callendar, you’re a big man,” I said, though he wasn’t — he was rather a runt — “and I want to shake your hand,” and I began suiting action to words, “because it takes a big man to admit that he’s been wrong. Shake, Mr. Callendar, shake! Put ‘er there! It was very big of you to do what you have done, and I admire you for it. Yes, sir, shake! You refused me a raise last Christmas because you said my department was overhead, and now you’ve given me one.”

By now he was looking as if he’d rather cut his hand off than leave it any longer in my clutches, and he finally managed to snatch it away. “It wasn’t much of a raise,” he said.

“Ho, that’s where you’re wrong again, Mr. Callendar. You may very well say that fifty-one thirty-three a week is about the same as fifty dollars a week, and I’m half-inclined to agree with you on that, but that’s beside the point. The point is, as I told you more than a year ago, the money doesn’t matter so much; what counts is the principle of the thing.”

“Well, I’m — I’m very glad you take it in that spirit.”

“I do indeed,” I assured him, “and that’s a very good word, too — spirit. Yes, it’s the spirit of the thing that counts.”

He was looking as if he wished I’d get the hell out of there. But I was playing it to the hilt.

“That’s what I was trying to make my wife understand,” I said, “when I was telling her about the raise you’ve given me. But I don’t know, I don’t think women understand these things the way men do. She seems to feel that the butcher and the corner grocer don’t give a hoot for the principle of the thing, and that all they care about is the money. Now, I don’t agree with her at all, but I’ve got to live with her, whereas with you it’s just the other way around. So I’ve had to see it her way, and I’ve just got myself another job, where she can buy a few more pork chops every week, since that’s the only way she seems able to understand any progress I might be making —”

“Eh — what’s that? Another job?”

“Yes, but don’t you worry, Mr. Callendar, I won’t see you stuck. Before I leave here, I’ll see that somebody’s broken in. I’ll see that everything is going smoothly before I finally pull out.”

And I did, too. For the next two weeks, nights and noon hours, I was at the new place, working with the man whose place I was filling, Howard Aldred Jones, while spending my days at the old place, with my own successor, whose name and face I have completely forgotten. Then for the two weeks after that, I was spending noon hours and nights at the old place, while working days at the new. The best part of that was that for a month straight I was drawing full salary at both places, a feature of the deal that I enjoyed so much that I hated to see it end.

But what I never did get to tell Mr. Callendar, and now of course it’s much too late, is that whether or not I knew what makes the wheels go round before I answered his letter, I think I learned it immediately thereafter, and I’ve been of the same opinion ever since. Huntley was wrong. It isn’t a little dingus called an axle at all, because that’s only there because the wheels are, and serves only to hold them together. No, it’s not that which makes them go round. It’s hot air. Then, now, and always.