Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son | Page 8

George Horace Lorimer
find your crowd following him, keep away from it. There
are times when it's safest to be lonesome. Use a little common-sense,
caution and conscience. You can stock a store with those three
commodities, when you get enough of them. But you've got to begin
getting them young. They ain't catching after you toughen up a bit.
You needn't write me if you feel yourself getting them. The symptoms
will show in your expense account. Good-by; life's too short to write
letters and New York's calling me on the wire.
Your affectionate father, JOHN GRAHAM.

+-------------------------------+ | No. 3 | +-------------------------------+ |
From John Graham, at the | | Union Stock Yards in | | Chicago, to his
son, | | Pierrepont, at Harvard | | University. Mr. Pierrepont | | finds
Cambridge to his | | liking, and has suggested | | that he take a
post-graduate | | course to fill up some | | gaps which he has found | | in
his education. | +-------------------------------+

III
June 1, 189-
Dear Pierrepont: No, I can't say that I think anything of your
post-graduate course idea. You're not going to be a poet or a professor,
but a packer, and the place to take a post-graduate course for that
calling is in the packing-house. Some men learn all they know from
books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all theory;
the second are all practice. It's the fellow who knows enough about
practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world a shove
ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it.

There's a chance for everything you have learned, from Latin to poetry,
in the packing business, though we don't use much poetry here except
in our street-car ads., and about the only time our products are given
Latin names is when the State Board of Health condemns them. So I
think you'll find it safe to go short a little on the frills of education; if
you want them bad enough you'll find a way to pick them up later, after
business hours.
The main thing is to get a start along right lines, and that is what I sent
you to college for. I didn't expect you to carry off all the education in
sight--I knew you'd leave a little for the next fellow. But I wanted you
to form good mental habits, just as I want you to have clean, straight
physical ones. Because I was run through a threshing machine when I
was a boy, and didn't begin to get the straw out of my hair till I was
past thirty, I haven't any sympathy with a lot of these old fellows who
go around bragging of their ignorance and saying that boys don't need
to know anything except addition and the "best policy" brand of
honesty.
We started in a mighty different world, and we were all ignorant
together. The Lord let us in on the ground floor, gave us corner lots,
and then started in to improve the adjacent property. We didn't have to
know fractions to figure out our profits. Now a merchant needs
astronomy to see them, and when he locates them they are out
somewhere near the fifth decimal place. There are sixteen ounces to the
pound still, but two of them are wrapping paper in a good many stores.
And there're just as many chances for a fellow as ever, but they're a
little gun shy, and you can't catch them by any such coarse method as
putting salt on their tails.
Thirty years ago, you could take an old muzzle-loader and knock over
plenty of ducks in the city limits, and Chicago wasn't Cook County
then, either. You can get them still, but you've got to go to Kankakee
and take a hammerless along. And when I started in the packing
business it was all straight sailing--no frills--just turning hogs into hog
meat--dry salt for the niggers down South and sugar-cured for the white
folks up North. Everything else was sausage, or thrown away. But

when we get through with a hog nowadays, he's scattered through a
hundred different cans and packages, and he's all accounted for. What
we used to throw away is our profit. It takes doctors, lawyers, engineers,
poets, and I don't know what, to run the business, and I reckon that
improvements which call for parsons will be creeping in next.
Naturally, a young man who expects to hold his own when he is thrown
in with a lot of men like these must be as clean and sharp as a hound's
tooth, or some other fellow's simply going to eat him up.
The first college man I ever hired was old John Durham's
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