: Old Gorgon Graham More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son by Lorimer George Horace - Didactic fiction; Fathers and sons Fiction; Epistolary fiction; Chicago (Ill.) Fiction; Merchants Fiction; Men Conduct of life Fiction; Social ethics Fiction

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No. 1

From John Graham, head of the house of Graham & Company, pork packers, in Chicago, familiarly known on 'Change as Old Gorgon Graham, to his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards. The old man is laid up temporarily for repairs, and Pierrepont has written asking if his father doesn't feel that he is qualified now to relieve him of some of the burden of active management.

CARLSBAD, October 4, 189-.

In the first place, it looks as if business might be pretty good this fall, and I'm afraid you'll have your hands so full in your place as assistant manager of the lard department that you won't have time to run my job, too.

Then I don't propose to break any quick-promotion records with you, just because you happened to be born into a job with the house. A fond father and a fool son hitch up into a bad team, and a good business makes a poor family carryall. Out of business hours I like you better than any one at the office, but in them there are about twenty men ahead of you in my affections. The way for you to get first place is by racing fair and square, and not by using your old daddy as a spring-board from which to jump over their heads. A man's son is entitled to a chance in his business, but not to a cinch.

It's been my experience that when an office begins to look like a family tree, you'll find worms tucked away snug and cheerful in most of the apples. A fellow with an office full of relatives is like a sow with a litter of pigs--apt to get a little thin and peaked as the others fat up. A receiver is next of kin to a business man's relatives, and after they are all nicely settled in the office they're not long in finding a job for him there, too. I want you to get this firmly fixed in your mind, because while you haven't many relatives to hire, if you ever get to be the head of the house, you'll no doubt marry a few with your wife.

For every man that the Lord makes smart enough to help himself, He makes two who have to be helped. When your two come to you for jobs, pay them good salaries to keep out of the office. Blood is thicker than water, I know, but when it's the blood of your wife's second cousin out of a job, it's apt to be thicker than molasses--and stickier than glue when it touches a good thing. After you have found ninety-nine sound reasons for hiring a man, it's all right to let his relationship to you be the hundredth. It'll be the only bad reason in the bunch.

I simply mention this in passing, because, as I have said, you ain't likely to be hiring men for a little while yet. But so long as the subject is up, I might as well add that when I retire it will be to the cemetery. And I should advise you to anchor me there with a pretty heavy monument, because it wouldn't take more than two such statements of manufacturing cost as I have just received from your department to bring me back from the graveyard to the Stock Yards on the jump. And until I do retire you don't want to play too far from first base. The man at the bat will always strike himself out quick enough if he has forgotten how to find the pitcher's curves, so you needn't worry about that. But you want to be ready all the time in case he should bat a few hot ones in your direction.

Some men are like oak leaves--they don't know when they're dead, but still hang right on; and there are others who let go before anything has really touched them. Of course, I may be in the first class, but you can be dead sure that I don't propose to get into the second, even though I know a lot of people say I'm an old hog to keep right along working after I've made more money than I know how to spend, and more than I could spend if I knew how. It's a mighty curious thing how many people think that if a man isn't spending his money their way he isn't spending it right, and that if he isn't enjoying himself according to their tastes he can't be having a good time. They believe that money ought to loaf; I believe that it ought to work. They believe that money ought to go to the races and drink champagne; I believe that it ought to go to the office and keep sober.

When a man makes a specialty of knowing how some other fellow ought to spend his money, he usually thinks in millions and works for hundreds. There's only one poorer hand at figures than these over-the-left financiers, and he's the fellow who inherits the old man's dollars without his sense. When a fortune comes without calling, it's apt to leave without asking. Inheriting money is like being the second husband of a Chicago grass-widow--mighty uncertain business, unless a fellow has had a heap of experience. There's no use explaining when I'm asked why I keep on working, because fellows who could put that question wouldn't understand the answer. You could take these men and soak their heads overnight in a pailful of ideas, and they wouldn't absorb anything but the few loose cuss-words that you'd mixed in for flavoring. They think that the old boys have corralled all the chances and have tied up the youngsters where they can't get at them; when the truth is that if we all simply quit work and left them the whole range to graze over, they'd bray to have their fodder brought to them in bales, instead of starting out to hunt the raw material, as we had to. When an ass gets the run of the pasture he finds thistles.

I don't mind owning up to you, though, that I don't hang on because I'm indispensable to the business, but because business is indispensable to me. I don't take much stock in this indispensable man idea, anyway. I've never had one working for me, and if I had I'd fire him, because a fellow who's as smart as that ought to be in business for himself; and if he doesn't get a chance to start a new one, he's just naturally going to eat up yours. Any man can feel reasonably well satisfied if he's sure that there's going to be a hole to look at when he's pulled up by the roots.

I started business in a shanty, and I've expanded it into half a mile of factories; I began with ten men working for me, and I'll quit with 10,000; I found the American hog in a mud-puddle, without a beauty spot on him except the curl in his tail, and I'm leaving him nicely packed in fancy cans and cases, with gold medals hung all over him. But after I've gone some other fellow will come along and add a post-graduate course in pork packing, and make what I've done look like a country school just after the teacher's been licked. And I want you to be that fellow. For the present, I shall report at the office as usual, because I don't know any other place where I can get ten hours' fun a day, year in and year out.

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