Ten North Frederick (17 page)

The office walls were covered with framed, signed photographs of himself and the prominent people he had met, however briefly. Movie stars and starlets, band leaders, politicians, the military, radio personalities, singers, lecturers, business executives. No man or woman of prominence was allowed to set foot in Gibbsville, whether for a bond drive or in ordinary business pursuits, without having his picture taken shaking hands or kissing Conrad L. Yates. And on his not infrequent visits to New York and Philadelphia night clubs his arrangement with the maitre-dee at almost any famous hot spot provided him with out-of-town photographs of himself with George Jessel, Frank Sinatra, Dorothy Lamour, Jack Pearl, a Royal Air Force wing commander, Ted Husing, Winthrop Aldrich, and a batboy of the New York Yankees; as well as one of the few photographs of Betty Grable taken from the front. They were precious souvenirs, usually dependable as a means of restimulating him when inevitably he felt a little tired.

He had come a long way from the farm, and up the hard way, with only seven years of schooling and in those years only a few months to the year. In his boyhood it had been a big treat to go to Gibbsville for a load of manure to be brought back to the farm in the wagon that had wheels or runners, depending on the weather. For boys in his position the escape from farming was a job on the railroad, either as a laborer in the roundhouses or to learn a trade. But he was too small to convince bosses that he was good laborer material, and he was too poor to become an apprentice, which paid nothing in the beginning. Nevertheless he left the farm, and at fifteen he was working in a Gibbsville livery stable, where he was given a cot, and subsisting on tips. He was too small to be a blacksmith, since most of a blacksmith's income came from shoeing horses. He saved the tips that the livery stable customers gave him, quit the job, got a job as a Postal Telegraph messenger boy, and enrolled in Gibbsville Business College night classes, which he would not have been able to do as an around-the-clock stable boy. His stenography and typing were a complete failure, but he was fascinated by bookkeeping in spite of his poor penmanship. His books were not the prettiest in his class, but they had the fewest traces of the ink eradicator.

He was eighteen years old and still a messenger boy when he first met Joseph B. Chapin, who had just started the practice of law with the firm of McHenry & McHenry. Two or three times a week the farm boy delivered telegrams to McHenry & McHenry, which were signed for by the handsome young lawyer. They made a good impression on each other, and not all of the impression the lawyer made on the farm boy was due to the lawyer's habit of giving the boy five cents every time a telegram was received. The money came out of petty cash, but the decision to give it was up to the young lawyer. Mr. Chapin was not too stuck up to walk part way down the street with Conrad, and without knowing it he became the first person of consequence to treat Conrad like a human being. Also without knowing it he became the first person Conrad ever loved.

One afternoon late they were alone in the office as the telegram was delivered and the nickel received. “Sank you, Mr. Shapin.”

“You're welcome, Conrad.”

“Mr. Shapin, excuse me vonce.”

“What is it, old chap?”

“I vant to ask you your adwice.”

“Well, that's what we're here for.”

“Ach, now, you're making chokes wiss me.”

“You want another kind of advice? That it?”

“
Ja
. Yes. I vant to stop work as messenchah poy.”

“Have you inherited a million, Conrad?”

“Making chokes wiss me again yet, Mr. Chapin. People lige to make chokes wiss me. My sice is too small already.”

“No more jokes, Conrad. What can I do for you?”

“Vell—I haf sree hunret dollahs safed up. Some say go to Philly, some say stay in Gippswille. Vhat do you say, Mr. Shapin?”

Joseph B. Chapin patted the tips of his fingers together. “Hmm,” he said. “You want me to advise you as a friend?”

“Yes, sir,” said Conrad, never having been called a friend by anyone.

“Hmm. Well, you've been in town how long?”

“Going on four years I vas here.”

“You've made quite a few friends in that short time.”

“Vell, I know some people, two hunret maybe.”

“You've worked hard, saved a nice little nest-egg in Gibbsville, and now you are thinking of trying your luck in the big city,” said Joseph B. Chapin.

“Yes, sir.”

“But you've never been to New York or Philadelphia.”

“I vas nefer to Reading down.”

“Well, Reading is bigger than Gibbsville, three or four times as large, and Philadelphia is ten times larger than Reading. You probably are thinking that means that many more opportunities. Possibly it does. But let us take into consideration the fact that you have a pretty good job here, and no job in Philadelphia. Friends here, and no friends in Philadelphia. And I can tell you from experience, it's easy to get lost in a big city until you know your way. I daresay you've thought of these things.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then there's one more consideration, Conrad.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your English. Here in Gibbsville we're accustomed to the Pennsylvania Dutch manner of speaking. We're used to it. But in a place like Philadelphia or New York—they think it's funny, and they're liable to laugh at it. They wouldn't be laughing at you. They'd be laughing at your way of speaking.”

“That is right.”

“When they hear you speak, you or anyone else from the Pennsylvania Dutch country, they may think you're imitating a stage comedian. They have comedians on the stage that talk very much like Pennsylvania Dutch. They'd laugh at you and hurt your feelings.”

Conrad nodded. “I vould srow somesing and get put in the lockup.”

“Well, I don't know how bad a temper you have, Conrad. But if I were you, I'd stay in Gibbsville a few years longer and lose some more of the accent. And who knows? You may not want to leave in a few years. You're bright and hard-working. Gibbsville is a growing town, on its way to becoming a city. Many, many opportunities here for a young man. I know I like it.”

Conrad stayed in Gibbsville and prospered. The same ingenuity and application in a larger city might have earned him greater rewards, but he never left Gibbsville. His block on South Main Street was a New Yorker's on Fifth Avenue, a Philadelphian's on Broad Street. His house out on Lantenengo Street was a New Yorker's in Glen Cove or a Philadelphian's in Ardmore. They represented his talent for taking over small, unprofitable enterprises and making them pay, either as going concerns or for their real estate position. He became known as “Wie Geht's Yates.” As his English became better he discovered that his Pennsylvania Dutch was not entirely the liability he thought it was. There was plenty of German among the Main Street merchants and he even understood the Yiddish of the Jews. Chiefly he was a real estate man, a restrained speculator. “All real estate is good,” he would say. “But the way you make money out of it is knowing when to get rid of it.” He bought and sold parcels in the shopping district, in the middle-class residential areas, and on Lantenengo Street. He owned, and relinquished, farms and factory sites, but he would not touch mining properties. “If they want to sell it to me, it ain't much good,” he would say. “I ain't no engineer, and they are.”

His interest in politics was genuine but hardly idealistic. It had to do with assessments and with zoning ordinances. He bought votes, and everybody made money; the men who had taken the bribes, and Conrad L. Yates, whose assessments were kept profitably low or whose properties were made or kept more attractive. He donated land for a hospital with the understanding that the area be designated a zone of quiet. He happened also to own much of the surrounding acreage, which became a peaceful residential development. He had a zoning law changed so that a prospective tenant could install carpet-cleaning machinery, which is noisy. He watched real estate prices go down as the neighboring housewives began to lose their minds, and when the prices were low enough, he bought the houses and sold them to a man who wanted to put up a planing mill, which is even noisier than a carpet cleanery.

As a businessman mayor he protected the citizens from any too-raw or too-large deals. His vigilance was not appreciated; everybody was making wartime money and when everybody is making money, deals are overlooked, Conrad well knew. But he was making sure that nothing too awful would be charged against his administration in future, less cynical years. Conrad Junior and Theodore Roosevelt Yates were in the Army, and between them had provided the Mayor with five grandchildren, which gave Conrad a sense of responsibility to his town and country. Moreover, to his great surprise and pleasure he had discovered, or had had discovered for him, the fact, and it was a fact, that an ancestor of his had fought in the American Revolution and that he and his children were eligible for membership in the appropriate societies. The discovery caused some embarrassed confusion at the Gibbsville Club, which had quietly blackballed Conrad for many years, and which as quietly admitted him in the nature of a fiftieth-birthday present. When a man who had thought of himself as a lowly member of the community finds that he has enviable ancestry and living descendants for the future, and has made himself a millionaire, he likes to pay his respects to future and past by some gesture that will have permanence. It seemed to Conrad Yates that a term as Mayor of Gibbsville, the metropolis and county seat, would make him a desirable ancestor of his unborn great-grandchildren and put him in almost the same category as his own Revolutionary forebear. He accordingly went directly to Mike Slattery, not to the merely local boys, and arranged with Mike to be elected Mayor. To Mike he was a welcome visitor. Except for the men whom he had bested in business deals, Conrad was a popular figure and could have won the election at a considerably smaller outlay than he made, but he wanted to win big, and Mike was happy to see the faithful workers get the money. The respectable element of the party regulars, such as Joe Chapin and Henry Laubach, were more than willing to sponsor Conrad, and so were the church people, the business community, the former poor, the young voters, and a sizable number of citizens who knew him only as Wie Geht's Yates. He won handsomely without the endorsement of organized labor, which correctly suspected him of a tendency to sympathize with big business (several parcels of Conrad's land were available for factory construction); and he got only token support from the slot-machine and whorehouse factions, which correctly suspected him of good morals.

 . . . Now, back in his City Hall office after the funeral and the luncheon, he was momentarily a little man again. But that, too, would pass. He sat in the high-back leather swivel-chair, which he had swung about so that he could see the row of photographs that included a cabinet-size likeness of Joseph B. Chapin, which Joe had given him after repeated requests. The inscription was noncommittal enough: “To Conrad L. Yates From His Friend Joe Chapin.” Conrad had wanted to get Joe Chapin to add to the inscription something about how Joe had made him stay in Gibbsville, but now it was too late. It was too late for a lot of things. He had wanted Joe and Edith Chapin once, just once, to come to his house for dinner. He had hoped for and half expected some small Christmas present from Joe, especially in one year when he had paid McHenry & Chapin (formerly McHenry & McHenry) a respectable sum in fees. But that year, as in other years, Joe Chapin sent him a chaste seasonal greeting, from Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Benjamin Chapin. The electric clock which Conrad had in reserve was unpacked and ended up in Teddy Yates's bedroom. As he looked now at the photograph of the man he admired, Conrad Yates realized that it would not have been
like
Joe Chapin to write the kind of intimate inscription that was on the photographs of movie actresses and ballplayers; no more than it would have been
like
Joe Chapin to send him a Christmas present, or even, for that matter, come to his house for dinner. Earlier in the day he had heard a dozen men and women comment that it was the first time they had been inside the Chapin residence. From that observation Conrad proceeded to the admission that there were plenty of people
he
did business with that he wouldn't have in
his
house. He did give away a lot of presents at Christmastime, and enjoyed doing it, but that was one of the differences between him and Joe Chapin. Joe Chapin did things one way, he did them another. And it pleased him to find that he and Joe had that point of similarity on the question of who was invited to your house.

In the mood engendered by that thinking Conrad put his mind to work on a project to honor the memory of Joe. He flipped a key on his intercom. “Get me Bob Hooker at the
Standard
,” he said.

 • • • 

Gibbsville's outstanding man of letters was reading the galley proofs of his next day's editorial page material. He glanced perfunctorily at the proofs of the syndicated columns, saw that they had been initialed by one of the proofreaders downstairs, and devoted his attention to what was sometimes called, but not within his hearing, his daily masterpiece. Bob Hooker's own editorials never were set in type lower than
10
-point, whether they appeared on the editorial page or, as on certain occasions, page one. No other editorializing or reporting was set in the same type, a rule which made it less difficult for style detectives to guess when Bob Hooker had spoken. When Bob Hooker spoke, his readers knew without further questioning what to expect in the way of policy or action from the Coal & Iron Company, the Taft-Grundy-Pew-Slattery faction of the Republican organization, the Ministerial Association, the American Red Cross, the Shade Tree Commission, the Greater Gibbsville Committee and Clean-Up Week. Since not everything he said was automatically popular, he was proud of the name Fighting Bob Hooker, and he lived in yearly expectation of favorable comparison with William Allen White and Ed Howe. Actually he had been so compared, but only locally, at luncheons, and he was waiting for similar word from New York. An article he sold to
The Saturday Evening Post
was a constant reminder to Gibbsville citizens that their man of letters was good enough for national publication; the inference, which was drawn and encouraged, being that Bob could do it any time he wanted to, but that the Gibbsville
Standard
and Gibbsville had first call on his talents. A later article, intended for the
Post's
Cities of America series, was returned to Bob with such reluctance that readers of the letter could not understand how the
Post
editors could bear to part with the article. It was not, however, wasted effort. The article was printed up as a leaflet for the Chamber of Commerce, for which Bob received an honorarium of $
250
.