Father, Son & Co. Read online

  Our eyes were wide open by this time. They had a thing in this police station such as I’ve never seen since: a stand-up cage about half the size of a telephone booth. The front would swing open, you’d straddle a bar, and they’d lock you in. It must have been for questioning suspects. You could move a little bit but you couldn’t get out. I remember the feeling of that. Then the chief took us to the back and put us in a cell.

  “Once you’re in jail, it’s a terrible place to be,” he said. “Most people turn into repeat offenders, and then there goes your life.” I dreamt about it afterward: getting caught and going to jail when I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  Mother really had her hands full with us. She married late, at age twenty-nine, and then had four children in the space of six years—me, my sisters Jane and Helen, and Arthur, whom everybody called Dick. Even though I was the oldest, Mother did not expect me to help look after my brother and sisters, so I was pretty much on my own as a boy. I loved Dick, but he was too young to be an interesting companion. Helen, the second youngest, was always a cozy friend. If she saw me with a bag of stolen candy, she’d want to know what it was, but I could always trust her to clam up around our parents. My relationship with Jane, who was closest to me in age, was more difficult. She would sometimes join in one of my escapades, but then she’d feel guilty and confess to Dad, getting me in trouble. Worse, Jane was Father’s favorite. He went far out of his way to accommodate her and she always called him by the odd name “My Joy” instead of Daddy or Father. This started as an endearment, but she kept it up as long as she lived. Mother thought it was inappropriate for Dad to play favorites, but there was very little she could do about that relationship.

  The fact that I wasn’t Dad’s favorite did not surprise me. From very early in my life I was convinced that I had something missing. I was never able to connect completely with what other people were doing. There is a film of my first-grade play in 1921, photographed by my father. The boys were all dressed as bumblebees and the movie shows us buzzing in and out among little girls dressed as flowers. I’m the tallest, long boned and ungainly, and you can spot me easily: while the other boys all have their wings neatly spread and pinned, mine are flapping around, all awry. I keep reaching back trying to set them straight.

  My lack of polish didn’t seem to hinder my father, who was on the rise in Short Hills society. He joined the tennis club, the school board, and the board of directors of the local bank, and may have been the only man in Short Hills who took his family to Europe every other summer, albeit on business. Dad quickly became a pillar of the Short Hills Episcopal church in spite of his roots as a humble Methodist. A few families saw him as nouveau riche and turned up their noses, but most of our neighbors admired Dad.

  He was a tall man, unathletic but fairly lean, and always impeccably attired. When we were very young he knew how to loosen up and have fun with us. I have films of him dressed in his three-piece suit marching with us and tooting a horn in a backyard parade. Dad loved to ham it up when our aunts and uncles and cousins visited for Sunday dinner. Sometimes he’d disappear upstairs with Mother and she’d help him struggle into one of her dresses. He’d come tottering down the stairs all decked out in a hat and veil and high-heeled shoes, clinging to the banister on one side with Mother steadying him on the other. When I was little I thought he was the liveliest father imaginable. But for some reason his playfulness gradually diminished, and by the time I was ten or eleven Dad acted quite formal and aloof. This loss of warm companionship made me sad, but looking back I think the cause was mainly age. Dad was thirty-nine by the time I was born, and the fact that he was ten years older than most other boys’ fathers made it difficult for us to be pals. He wasn’t one to come out and play ball, or invite me for a hike around the local reservoir.

  Father must have known he had an uncontrollable temper that might feed on itself, because when there was punishing to be done he made Mother do it. These punishments became a sort of ritual. I would go up with the two of them to their big white-tiled bathroom. Father would stand over near his basin to observe, I would hold onto a towel rack, and Mother would do the switching.

  I quickly developed a sense of what is fair and just, which these punishments, to my mind, sometimes were not. I’ll never forget one switching I got when I was ten. It was March, the snow was melting, and my parents had given me new rubber boots. I rushed right out of the house and, to test the boots, stepped down into a hole that had water in it. It was deeper than I thought and water poured in over the tops. Mother and Dad insisted that I had soaked myself on purpose. Soon I was facing the towel rack, thinking I was getting rooked.

  Switchings didn’t stop me from getting into trouble, however. The following winter I kept asking Father for a leather coat. They made double-breasted leather coats for kids in those days that came down to about mid-thigh. Finally my father presented one to me, with great pride, for my eleventh birthday. Coming home from school the next day, some buddies and I made a fire—it’s fascinating to make fires when you’re young. I’d been reading about Indians and smoke signals, so I took that beautiful leather coat that had been on my back only once and used it with another guy to make signals from the fire. Then I tried to clean it up and couldn’t. There were big burns all through it. I felt awful about what I’d done, but that made no difference when I told my parents. They switched me anyway.

  Life didn’t go much better for me at school. My brother and sisters and I went to Short Hills Country Day School, a rustic-looking turn-of-the-century brick-and-shingle structure within walking distance of our house. The curriculum was conventional and not very demanding, and in most classes I would watch the clock. The school clocks came from Father—IBM had a time division, and he donated a system that rang the bells to change classes. There was a master clock in the headmaster’s office and classroom clocks throughout the building. These did not move smoothly from one minute to the next. They would stay on 9:04 until the main clock got to 9:05; then they’d all go CLICK CLICK and move up one minute. It would get to 2:56, and I’d be thinking “Just eight more clicks and I get out of here.”

  My report cards were always a jumble of Ds and Fs with an occasional A or B. I learned much better by doing than by reading, probably because words on a page seemed to swim around whenever I tried to read. It was years before I learned how to compensate for whatever flaw in my vision kept me from reading normally. In school, deportment was the area in which I really stood out—my conduct marks were the worst. You could get fifty demerits a semester at Short Hills Country Day School without being thrown out; I’d always have more than thirty and sometimes more than forty. To work off demerits you had to run laps around the building on Saturdays, in full view of passersby. I sometimes had to run fifty laps while other people were doing ten.

  For some reason, being punished only drove me to greater mischief. When I was about twelve, I met Craig Kingsbury, an outdoorsman type, not much older than I, who went trapping in a nearby swamp. I sought him out for advice about how to skin a squirrel I had shot. When he mentioned that he sometimes skinned skunks it didn’t take me an instant to zero in. “What do you do with the stink glands?” I asked. It turned out that Kingsbury knew how to extract skunk juice and put it in bottles. I bought some from him.

  At school just before assembly I sneaked down to the furnace and examined the ducts going off in various directions. I thought that if you put something in the main vent it would spread through the whole building. So I dumped in the entire bottle, ran upstairs, and went to the assembly hall. A hundred kids were sitting there, along with the teachers and the headmaster, Mr. Lance, a straitlaced disciplinarian who knew me well.

  There was a terrible stink, and the longer we sat the worse the stink got. Finally Mr. Lance said, “Is there anyone who knows anything about this detestable smell?”

  There was a long silence. We had an honor system, so eventually I raised my hand.

  “Watson!”

  “Yes
, sir.”

  “Stand up!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What do you know about this?”

  I explained what I’d done, how I’d gotten the skunk juice, and I pulled the bottle out of my pocket to show him. Everyone backed away a little.

  Then the teachers opened all the windows and tried to fan out the smell. Finally Mr. Lance decided the school had to close. It was my moment of ultimate triumph. Whatever happened to me as a result was worth it.

  Mr. Lance didn’t know how to deal with me. His first idea was to tie the empty skunk-juice bottle around my neck. But that was too minor a punishment, because I was getting used to the smell by then and it didn’t bother me very much.

  His next move was more effective. There was a school board meeting that night. Mr. Lance waited until it convened and then described my transgression—to the chagrin of my father, who was on the board.

  By the time he got home Dad was in a fury. He began by saying it was wrong for me to have forced the school to close, thereby depriving my sisters and other honest children of the opportunity to learn. Father never struck me, but this time he came close and I bolted. He chased me and roared, “I don’t need to discipline you! The world will discipline you, you little skunk!”

  My father went from rags to riches, but what impressed me was how close he came to staying in rags. He was the only son of an immigrant Scots-Irishman who made a meager living cutting lumber and farming in New York State, which was still quite primitive in the 1880s when Dad was a boy. Dad had four sisters, all older than he, and the family lived in a cramped four-room cabin with no running water near the town of Painted Post. Dad’s first job, at age seventeen, was selling pianos, organs, and sewing machines to farm families off the back of a wagon. Salesmanship was his ticket into the world, and he loved talking about those early days as a peddler. “Everything starts with a sale,” he’d say. “If there’s no sale, there’s no commerce in the whole of America.” As a salesman Dad wasn’t a back-slapper; he had a thoughtful manner that people responded to. You’d be attracted by his good looks, his slightly reserved way of speaking, his attentiveness—and before long you’d find yourself sold.

  His first boss took advantage of him. Dad worked for a local hardware dealer named W. F. Bronson, who loaned him a wagon and paid him twelve dollars a week. Dad thought this was a stupendous amount—he was making more than the cashier at the Painted Post bank, for example—until one day a sales agent for the organ company said, “You’re certainly selling a lot of instruments. What’s your pay?” When Dad proudly told him, he said, “That’s awful!” He explained that salesmen usually earn commissions, not salaries, and that on a commission basis Bronson ought to be paying Dad around sixty-five dollars a week. Dad quit the next day. From then on, he always wanted to be paid by commission, so he could be sure of getting his just reward.

  My father used to say his ambition grew in stages. The more he saw of the world, the more he wanted to achieve. He could remember standing on a muddy roadside as a boy and watching Amory Houghton Jr., the founder of the Corning Glass Works, ride past in his carriage, which made Dad want a team and rig of his own. Dad got another glimpse of wealth after he had moved up several notches and was selling cash registers: a Chicago lawyer he had met invited my father to his grand house on the shore of Lake Michigan. The lawyer remarked that he, too, had started out on a farm, so Dad raised his sights again.

  For the first several years he seemed predestined to fail. He went to the city of Buffalo to find work when he was nineteen, but selling sewing machines to farmers wasn’t very good preparation for what he encountered. Buffalo in the 1890s was a sprawling, rough, unfriendly place in the middle of a recession. Jobs were scarce and soon Dad was hard up. He told me that at one point he was reduced to sleeping on a pile of sponges in the basement of a drugstore. He had only one suit to his name, and when he could afford to get it pressed he had to wait in the back of the tailor shop in his underwear until it was ready.

  The first man in Buffalo to recognize his talent was a salesman named C. B. Barron, who took Dad on as his assistant. Barron, unfortunately, was a flamboyant city slicker who sold stock in the Northern New York State Building and Loan Association up and down the shores of Lake Erie. Dad thought Barron was the most worldly and charming fellow he’d ever met; he was too naive to see that the guy was a crook. When Barron came into a town he’d rent the finest room at the local hotel and then say to the bell captain, “I’m C. B. Barron. I want to be paged three times during dinner. I have reasons for it, not important to you. Here are a couple of dollars.” Soon word would get around that there was an important stranger in town who had come to sell shares in the Building and Loan. The stock itself was legitimate; investors paid for it in installments, like a savings plan. Barron would keep the first payment as his commission, which enabled him to live pretty high.

  A photo of Dad from that period shows Barron’s influence. My father is sitting on a stump and looks like a caricature of the turn-of-the-century traveling man, with his silk hat, frock coat, high-button shoes, striped socks, and ridiculous handlebar mustache. His share of the building-and-loan commissions amounted to more money than he’d ever seen, and Dad decided to go into business for himself on the side. He opened a butcher shop in Buffalo, intending to use future proceeds from his work with Barron to start more and more stores. Chain stores were just beginning to spread around America then, and the idea of running a retail empire appealed to my father. But in less than a year, it all fell apart. Dad woke up one morning on a sales trip to find that Barron had taken off with their funds; since Dad had no savings to fall back on, instead of being able to open his second butcher shop, he had to sell the first.

  My father had the ability to overcome setbacks that would have sent other young men back to the farm. Later on this optimism came out in slogans that everybody in IBM had to learn—“Make Things Happen,” “Ever Onward,” “Beat Your Best,” and so on. He knew how to find opportunity where none seemed to be, such as in the remnants of his butcher shop business. He had bought a cash register for the store on the installment plan, and when he went downtown to transfer responsibility for the payments to the new owner, he used the occasion to talk his way into a job with the National Cash Register Company. That was the lucky break that made his career. The Cash, as it was called, was one of America’s best-known companies. It belonged to John Henry Patterson, a fierce little tycoon from Dayton who was on a campaign to make the cash register an indispensable fixture in every modern store. Having used a cash register himself, my father thought he could convince other store owners of its virtues and he was right—he soon became one of the top salesmen at the Cash.

  Patterson, who shows up in business histories as “the father of modern salesmanship,” was in effect my business grandfather. Dad worked for him for eighteen years and learned from him many of the ideas that built IBM. Patterson’s genius was to figure out how to take crude, partly educated, ambitious commercial travelers like Dad and mold them into America’s first national sales force. He made his salesmen memorize and use standardized sales pitches, inspired them with revival-like meetings, and challenged and bullied them into hitting sales quotas that were sky-high. One of his innovations was to break up each sales region into exclusive territories, so no salesman had to worry about others from the company stealing his prospects. Since the Cash had a virtual monopoly on the cash register business, these territories were valuable indeed. Patterson paid extraordinarily well—it wasn’t unusual for a man with only a few years’ experience to make one hundred dollars a week, which had the buying power of fifteen hundred dollars today. Being a salesman at the turn of the century was an ignoble job, but under Patterson it became almost a profession.

  My father rose through the ranks at the Cash Register company, and by the time he and Mother met sixteen years later, he was Patterson’s second-in-command. Tall, handsome, and well-turned-out, Dad was also Dayton’s most eligible bachelo
r. He could be seen driving around town in a fine Pierce-Arrow automobile given to him by Mr. Patterson. He had plenty of money—enough so that when his father developed diabetes and died, Dad was able to take over as head of the family and support his mother and sisters in style. He set them up in a fine stone house in Rochester, New York, where he’d run a sales office, and he found successful salesmen for my aunts to marry. But he put off getting married himself, he explained to me, because he had seen successful men who married without much thought of the future and then found themselves burdened with wives who couldn’t keep up as they rose in the world. Such men would suffer their wives or get divorced. He’d had girlfriends before Mother—he said he’d thought of marrying one who was an opera singer in Philadelphia—but he wanted a real lifetime partner. So he waited until he could find someone who would provide both an intellectual and a social boost.

  Dad liked to tell the employees at IBM that convincing Jeannette Kittredge to be his wife was the finest sale he’d ever made. Mother’s family was prominent in Dayton. Her father headed the Barney and Smith Railroad Car Company, a maker of railroad passenger cars, and Mother told stories from her girlhood of riding in beautiful new cars with varnished interiors. She used to say she first noticed Father at a country club dinner, when she looked down the table and saw that he was the only guest besides herself who had left his wineglass untouched. Her father was a strict, teetotaling Presbyterian, and she knew she’d need his consent for any mate she picked. Mother was capable of making great leaps of sentiment and she immediately thought, “That’s the man I’m going to marry.” Her father approved of the match, and so did Mr. Patterson, who always liked the idea of his employees’ gaining status in Dayton society. When my parents came back from their honeymoon—a combination sightseeing and business trip to the West Coast—Patterson surprised them with the keys to a house he’d put up for them near his own. Dad’s life finally seemed to be turning out the way he dreamed. But the following year, just after I was born, my parents were forced to leave Dayton under painful circumstances. After building my father up for so many years, Patterson turned around and pushed him out of the cash register company.