To Sail Beyond the Sunset (24 page)

But when the whole family went for a joy ride, we piled Nancy and Carol, Brian Junior and George, into the roomy tonneau…with Nancy charged with seeing that no one stood up on the back seat (not to save the leather upholstery but to protect the child); I sat up front with Marie, and Brian drove.

The picnic basket and the lemonade jug were carried in the tonneau, Carol being charged with keeping her brothers out of the picnic. We would drive out to Swope Park, picnic there, and see the zoo animals, then joy ride again after the picnic, perhaps clear out to Raytown or even Hickman Mills…then home with the children falling asleep, to a supper of picnic remains and cups of hot soup.

Nineteen twelve was a good year, despite a blizzard touted as the “worst since ’86” (it may have been; I don’t remember the ’86 blizzard too clearly). It was a campaign year, with a noisy three-sided race, Mr. Taft running for reelection, Teddy Roosevelt at outs with his former protégé Mr. Taft and running on his own “Bull Moose” (Progressive Republican) ticket, and Professor Wilson of Princeton, now governor of his state, running on the Democratic ticket.

That last was a surprise outcome to an unbelievable month-long convention in which it seemed for days that Missouri’s favorite son, Mr. Champ Clark, Speaker of the House, would be nominated. Mr. Clark led for twenty-seven ballots and had a clear majority on several but not the two-thirds majority the Democrats required. Then Mr. William Jennings Bryan made a bargain with Dr. Wilson, to be named secretary of state, and Governor Wilson was nominated on the forty-sixth ballot after many of the delegates had gone home.

I followed all this in the
Star
with deep interest as I had read Dr. Wilson’s monumental (eighteen volumes!)
A History of the American People
, borrowing it a volume at a time from the Kansas City Public Library. But I did not mention my interest to my husband as I suspected that he favored Colonel Roosevelt.

The election day was the fifth but we did not learn the outcome at once—three days I think it was. Woodrow was born Monday the eleventh at 3:00
P.M.
, and arrived squalling. Betty Lou midwifed me; as usual I was too fast for my doctor and this time Briney was at work, as I had told him that it couldn’t be sooner than the end of that week.

Betty Lou said, “Have you picked a name for this one?”

I said, “Yes. Ethel.”

She held the baby up. “Take another look; that name doesn’t match this tassel; better save it. Why don’t you name him after our new president? That should give him a running start.”

I don’t remember what I said as Brian arrived about then, Betty Lou having telephoned him. She greeted him at the door with, “Come meet Woodrow Wilson Smith, president of the United States in 1952.”

“Sounds good.” Brian marched into our bedroom, imitating a brass band. The name stuck; we registered it with the Foundation and with the County.

When I thought it over, the name pleased me. I wrote a note to Dr. Wilson, telling him of his namesake and saying that I was praying for the success of his administration. I received back, first, a note from Mr. Patrick Tumulty, acknowledging my letter and saying that it was being brought to the attention of the president elect “but you will understand, Madam, that recent events have flooded him with mail. It will be several weeks before all of it can be answered personally.”

Shortly after Christmas I did receive a letter from Dr. Wilson, thanking me for having honored him in the naming of my son. I framed it and had it for years. I wonder if it is still in existence somewhere on time line two?

The 1912 presidential campaign had been fought on the issue of the “High Cost of Living.” The Smith family was not suffering but prices, food prices especially, were indeed rising—while as usual the farmers were complaining that they were not receiving even cost-of-production prices for what they grew. This may well have been so—I recall that wheat was less than a dollar a bushel.

But I did not buy wheat by the bushel; I bought food at a local grocery store and from my huckster and my milkman and so forth. Again Brian asked me if I needed a raise in household allowance.

“Possibly,” I answered. “We are getting by, but prices are going up. A dozen freshly gathered eggs cost five cents now, and so does a quart of grade A. The Holsum Bread Company is talking about changing from two sizes at a nickel and a dime to two sizes at ten cents and fifteen cents. Want to bet that this does not mean a raise in price by the pound—I repeat, by the pound, not by the loaf—of at least twenty percent?”

“Find yourself another sucker, sister; I already bet on the election. I was thinking about meat prices.”

“Up. Oh, just a penny or two a pound, but it goes on. But I’ve noticed something else. Mr. Schontz used to include a soup bone without being asked. And some liver for Random. Suet for birds in the winter. Now those things happen only if I ask for them and, when I do, he doesn’t smile. Just this week he said that he was going to have to start charging for liver as people were beginning to eat it, not just cats. I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to Random.”

“Let’s keep first things first, my love; my wedding present must be fed. How you behave toward cats here below determines your status in Heaven.”

“Really?”

“That’s straight out of the Bible; you can look it up. Have you talked to Nelson about cat food?”

“It would not occur to me to do so. Betty Lou, yes; Nelson, no.”

“Just remember that he is a professional economist concerning the growing and marketing of foodstuffs and he has a handsome sheepskin to prove it. Nel tells me that, starting anytime now, cats and dogs are going to have their own food industry—fresh food, packaged food, canned food, special stores or special departments in stores, and national advertising. Big business. Millions of dollars. Even hundreds of millions.”

“Are you sure he wasn’t joking? Nelson will joke about anything.”

“I don’t think he was. He was quite serious and he had figures to back his remarks. You have seen how gasoline-powered machinery has been displacing horses, not just here in the city, but on farms—slowly but more each year. So we have out-of-work horses. Nelson says not to worry about those horses; the cats will eat them.”

“What a horrid thought!”

At Brian’s urging I worked up a chart that told me how grocery prices were rising. Fortunately I had thirteen years of exact records of what I had spent on food, what items, how much per peck, or pound, or dozen, etc. Briney had never required me to do it but it matched what my mother had done and it truly was a great help to me during those years of pinching every penny to know just what return I had received in food for each cent I had spent.

So I worked up this big chart, then figured out what a year’s “ration” was, per person, as if I were feeding an army—so many ounces of flour, so many ounces of butter, of sugar, of meat, of fresh vegetables, of fresh fruits—not much for canned goods as I had learned, early on, that the only economical way to get canned goods was by canning stuff myself.

Eventually I produced a curve, the cost of a ration for one adult, 1899-1913.

It was a fairly smooth curve, trending steadily up, and with inflexure upward. There were minor discontinuities but, on the whole, it was a smooth first-order curve.

I looked at that curve and it tempted me. I got down my old text for analytical geometry, from Thebes High School, measured some ordinates, abscissas, and slopes—plugged in the figures and wrote down the equation.

And stared at it. Had I actually derived a formula by which food prices could be predicted? Something the big brains with Ph.D.s and endowed chairs could not agree on?

No, no, Maureen! There is not a crop failure on there, not a war, not any major disaster. Not enough facts. “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Don’t make too much stew from one oyster.

I put my analytical work away where no one would find it. But I kept that chart. I did not use it for prediction but I did keep plotting that curve because it let me go to Briney and show him exactly why I needed a larger allowance, whenever I did—instead of waiting until it reached the “fried mush” situation. I did not hesitate to ask because Brian Smith Associates were prosperous.

I no longer was secretary-bookkeeper of our family firm; I had relinquished that status when Nelson, Betty Lou, and our business office had all moved out of the house together, two years earlier. No friction between us, not at all, and I had urged them to stay. But they wanted to be on their own and I understood that. Brian Smith Associates took an office near Thirty-first and Paseo, second floor, over a haberdashery, a location near the Troost Avenue Bank and the PO substation. It was a good neighborhood for an office outside the downtown financial district. The Nelson Johnsons had their first home of their own about a hundred yards south on a side street, South Paseo Place.

This meant that Betty Lou could handle the records and go to the bank and pick up the mail, while still taking care of her two children, i.e., the back room of the company’s “palatial suite” was converted into a day nursery.

Yet I was only twenty minutes away and could relieve her if she needed me, straight down Thirty-first by trolley car, good neighborhoods at both ends, where I need not feel timid even after dark.

We continued this way until 1915, when Brian and Nelson hired a downy duckling fresh out of Spaulding’s Commercial College, Anita Boles. Betty Lou and I continued to keep an eye on the books and one of us would be in the office if both men were out of town, as this child still believed in Santa Claus. But her typing was fast and accurate. (We had a new Remington now. I kept my old Oliver at home—a loyal friend, grown feeble.)

So I continued to know our financial position. It was good and got steadily better. Brian accepted points in lieu of full fee several times in the years 1906-1913; five of these enterprises had made money and three had paid quite well: a reopened zinc mine near Joplin, a silver mine near Denver, and a gold mine in Montana…and Briney was just cynical enough that he paid freely under the table to keep a close check on both the silver mine and the gold mine. He told me once, “You can’t stop high-grading. Even your dear old grandmother can be tempted when gold ore gets so heavy that you can simply pick it up and know that it is loaded. But you can make stealing difficult if you are willing to pay for service.”

By 1911 there was plenty of money coming in, but I could not tell where much of it was going—and I would not ask Briney. It came in, it showed in the books; Nelson drew out some of it, Brian drew out more of it. Some of it wound up in my hands and in Betty Lou’s hands to support our two households. But that did not account for all of it. The firm’s checking account was simply an aid to bookkeeping, a means to pay Anita and to pay by check other expenses; it was never allowed to grow larger than was needed for those purposes.

It was many years before I learned more than that.

On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Serbia, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated. He was Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an otherwise useless piece of royalty, and to this day I have never been able to understand why this event could cause Germany to invade Belgium a month later. I read carefully all the newspapers at the time; I’ve studied all the books I could lay hands on since, and I still can’t see it. Sheer folly. I can see why, by a sort of insane logic, the Kaiser would attack his first cousin in St. Petersburg—a network of “suicide-compact” alliances.

But why invade Belgium?

Yes, yes, to get at France. But why get at France at all? Why go out of your way to start wars on two fronts? And why do it through Belgium when that would drag in the one nation on Earth with a navy big enough to bottle up the German High Seas Fleet and deny it the high seas?

I heard my father and my husband talking about these matters on August 4, 1914. Father had come over for dinner but it was not a merry occasion—it was the day of the invasion of Belgium and there had been extras out on the streets.

Brian asked, “
Beau-père
, what do you think about it?”

Father was slow to answer. “If Germany can conquer France in two weeks, Great Britain will drop out.”

“Well?”

“Germany can’t win that fast. So England will come in. So it will be a long, long war. Write the ending yourself.”

“You mean we will be in it.”

“Be a pessimist and you will hardly ever be wrong. Brian, I know little or nothing about your business. But it is time for all businesses to get on a war footing. What do you deal in that is bound to get involved?”

Briney said nothing for several moments. “All metals are war materials. But—
Beau-père
, if you have some money you want to risk, let me point out that mercury is indispensable for munitions. And scarce. Mostly they mine it in Spain. A place called Almaden.”

“Where else?”

“California. Some in Texas. Want to go out to California?”

“No. Been there. Not my taste. I think I’ll go back to my digs and get off a letter to Leonard Wood. Damn it, he made the switch from medical corps to line officer—he ought to be able to tell me how I can do it.”

Briney looked thoughtful. “I don’t want to be in the engineers again, either. I don’t belong there.”

“You’ll be a pick-and-shovel soldier again if you wait and join up here.”

“How’s that?”

“The old Third Missouri is going to be reorganized as an engineer regiment. Wait around long enough and they’ll hand you a shovel.”

I kept my best unworried mask on, and kept on knitting. It felt like the end of April 1898.

The European War dragged along, horribly, with stories of atrocities in Belgium and of ships being sunk by German submarine boats. One could feel a division building up in America; the sinking of the
Lusitania
in May 1915 brought the dichotomy sharply to the fore. Mother wrote from St. Louis about the strong sentiment there for the Central Powers. Her parents, my grandpa and grandma Pfeiffer, apparently took it for granted that all decent people supported “the Old Country” in this struggle—this, despite the fact that
Grossvater’s
parents had come to America in 1848 to get away from Prussian imperialism, along with their son, who was just the right age to be conscripted if they had not emigrated. (Grandpa was born in 1830.)