stander who is beguiled by much talk of "guaranties." And if the worker of this game is brought to time, the excuse is very patent, for all the auctioneer guarantees is that he is selling a ring, and if the "block-boy" has handed him a "white stone" instead of a genuine diamond during the excitement of auctioning, why how can the auctioneer be responsible? Thus are the bona fide buyers victimized. If by any chance they come into possession of an article of value, they are directed or conducted to the wrapping table where clever clerks effect a nefarious substitution.

This is the "jam sale" auction "pitch" and it is so fraught with fraud that it and the minor "jamming" schemes have "closed" many a prosperous community to the whole guild of pitchmen. Hence some of them, in self-protection, have organized the National Pitchmen's and Salesmen's Protective Associationthe N. P. S. P. A. as it is familiarly known among the guild.

This association of our free-lance traveling-men has lodges in Cincinnati, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans and other cities, and business agents who will tell each pitchman who carries a paid-up card where and what to sell in his particular territory. The initiation fee is waived, but dues are $10.00 a year. And the "jam" men scoff at it because they are not eligible to membership. The officials of the N. P. S. P. A. are pledged to a program of reform. Too many city authorities are looking askance upon the gentlemen who seek to "pitch' with "tripes" and "keister" in their midst.

Curiously enough the pitchmen with medicine shows are the greatest sufferers from official harassment. In "pitching" they were the pioneers, for shortly after the Civil War sundry surgeons who had seen much service on bloody battle-fields and found it difficult to settle down, blossomed out as ornate medical missionaries. Their nostrums were found in every home, so that in time the itinerant practitioner developed also into a proprietor. First he possessed himself of a buggy or colorful carryall in which he journeyed from town to town dispensing surecure remedies, then of a large tent and a loud brass band which, at night, became an orchestra that furnished music for a minstrel show or dramatic performance or musical comedy.

The charge at the door was ten cents. The performance was centered on the lecturer. The hundreds who came from miles around to see his show and hear his eloquence did not recognize the once plain ex-army man, because he had blossomed out into Dr. Arizona Jack or Dr. Lightall or some other romantic figure with long mustache, goatee and curly hair that flowed all over his shoulder blades. A tall silk hat or broad-brimmed felt, red vest, Prince Albert coat and fawn-colored trousers and big chamois boots, dazzled the natives almost as much as did his enormous diamonds and his booming voice that carried conviction everywhere.

The star of the well-equipped medicine show was usually supported by aborigines, for, in the electrifying language of the orator:

"The aboriginal Indians of America have long been noted for the cure of diseases that have baffled physi

cians from time immemorial. It has, good peepul, always been recognized as a fact by our scientists that the Indian with his roots, herbs, barks, leaves, flowers and berries can perform more lasting and miraculous cures than any mere physician would dare to dream of.

"This is only owing to the fact that the Indian has the natural, Godgiven birthright for the use of roots, herbs, barks, leaves, flowers and berries, and the Indian knows how to cure his rheumatism by placing his leg between hot stones. But he has a better way than that to heal himself and others, too.

"Now, ladees and gentlemen, the preparation that I have here is nature's own gift to the red man and his own gift to the white man. It is a combination of roots, herbs, barks, leaves, flowers and berries, made by the Indians who just danced for you. It is an invaluable specific for the stomach, kidneys and the bowels and it is guaranteed and sold with the distinct understanding that if it fails to help or benefit you in any way your money will be returned to you. One dollar per bottle is all it costs. My agents will wait on those who cannot reach the platform. Remember the show's not half over yet. The full orchestra will play while you make your purchases."

While there were many variations of this speech, the formula of "roots, herbs, barks, leaves, flowers and berries" remained inviolate, and it was professionally asserted and generally believed that the braves, squaws and papooses with the show were the manufacturers of the medicine. It usually bore an Indian name, as it often does even to this day.

For while the medicine show is not so popular as it was at least with the authorities who have banned it from several States and have discouraged it elsewhere by high licenses-it still persists. A recent census disclosed the fact that eighteen hundred shows or individuals are selling remedies, after the manner of fifty years ago, although the doctors have taken to shorter hair and have tabooed much of the spectacular. The painless dentists who once operated on street corners under the gasoline "flares" and depended on suggestion, mob psychology and the music of a loudly vocal banjoist to counteract their victim's tendencies to groan, have returned, most of them, to the office and the dental chair. Outside the cities, and in some of them, you will still find the old-time medicine "worker" functioning; but the buggies rented from local liverystables and his gaily painted carryalls have been replaced by motor-cars. He is not so much in evidence now, because the movies overshadow him and he is enormously outnumbered by pitchmen who are merely, although picturesquely, merchandizers.

These pitchmen follow the birds in their flight. Wind, rain, snow, hail and sleet are their enemies. So are the merchants in many towns. But they journey untiringly from State to State and invade Canada and Mexico.

23

Hardship is stoically accepted by the wandering pitchman, as when V.L. Torres sleeps in the Arizona deserts with lizards, scorpions and gila monsters until he struggles into Phoenix only to learn from the chief of police that he will not be allowed

to sell "a meritorious article" which he "manufactures." Whereupon he sets out for California.

Clarence Steadman, better known among his guild as "Rolling Along," finds he can sell his particular merchandise in Nashville if he pays a State, county and city license totaling fourteen dollars, and an additional charge of five dollars a day to some one who owns a doorway. But the only virtue he discovers in that community is that food and clothing are cheap, if one is a purchaser, and Mr. Steadman is not buying food or clothing. He yearns to retail razor-strops. After Fred J. Reid and two fellows of the "tripes" and "keister" have paid their licenses and become guests at a good hotel in Houston, so it is said, they are arrested and fined fifty dollars each for vagrancy, an experience that greatly puzzles and distresses them. But they are relatively fortunate. Doc Ralph Summers, and associates, are arrested and fined $150 for giving away a bottle-a sixteen-ounce bottle of medicine after "amusing the standing natives" of Yellowyam, Georgia. No sooner are they out of jail and entering the town of Coldridge, than they are coldly seized by the authorities and fined so thoroughly that they lose their car and everything.

A favorite "pitch" in Boston is the vacant lot at Kneeland and Washington streets, but this is "closed" to pitchmen because "dope" fiends are discovered among their prospective customers, and Federal narcotic agents suspect that some of the pitchman's associates may be distributing "coke."

A veteran of the lots and streets is fatally injured by an explosion while

manufacturing material with which to "flukem" during the coming season. Pitchmen die as all men must, and most of them die in poverty. They make large profits, now and then, but have long weeks of adversity. Yet most of them are buoyant, gladsome souls. They are their own bosses, and if times are so hard that one of them cannot buy gasoline for his flivver, he waits patiently until some brother comes along when five dollars starts him out again.

Five dollars will set him up in trade. A few knife-sharpeners, potato-peelers or nail-files and a lucky "pitch" increase his capital amazingly. And so he and his brethren float from town to town, from State to State indefinitely. Three inches of snow fall on the just Earle Crumley at Hull, Quebec. It is November 8 and he wonders if his old pal, George Sperry, last heard of in Juarez, Mexico, remembers when he helped Earle discover Hull as a pitchman's profitable trading point. Pondering on this, Earle sets forth, tending southward until, in two weeks, one hears of him motoring through Oklahoma, westward bound. The world is his oyster and will always be.

The veteran Charles Meadows offers through the columns of "The Billboard," a trade paper which is the weekly medium of communication for this unique and restless guild, a careful analysis of trade conditions at Flint, Michigan, and concludes, since he lost twenty-two dollars in five days, it is no place for any one to "pitch."

It is amazing how much each knows of what distant regions offer. The Widow Rollins down in Florida warns her fellows that it will be a

hard winter there. She has developed a clientele to which she will sell enough lodge emblems to make a living, but she wonders plaintively if fate will not soon bring her another husband. "Pitching," even for a highly individualized modern woman, is sometimes lonesome, she'll tell the world.

The news comes up from Knoxville that George Jennier has taken unto himself a wife in the charming person of Miss Emma Orton and that the happy couple will be at home to all friends at 309 Spring Street until the robins sing again.

Greek meets Greek in Louisana, but instead of staging a tug of war, the pitchmen Greeks exchange experiences and then part to meet, six months hence, in Vermont or Minnesota or New Mexico. It matters not to them that they are gifted with enough ability to earn large salaries as wholesale commercial travelers. They are almost invariably salesmen extraordinary; for, instead of having to study a single customer at a time, which is about all the average salesman has to do, the pitchman, "working" on a busy street or a crowded fair-ground, must know just when to make his "closing" talk to ten or

twenty or two hundred widely varying individuals.

And yet I've seen one young pitchman hold his customers beside a noisy merry-go-round-hold them for thirty minutes—until his eyes and instinct told him the moment had come to realize on his investments of time, talent and energy, whereupon he sold fifty dollars worth of collar buttons in ten minutes!

You will find pitchmen selling in lumber-camps, at coal-mines, in motor factories, in little Alabama cotton towns or where Missouri mules are happiest. You'll find them pitching in the heart of Chicago, Los Angeles or Jacksonville. You may find them dripping wet with perspiration as they toil and talk under a broiling, killing Southern sun. Or they may be chilled to the marrow in a Maine coast fog. They may be wealthy beyond their dreams of avarice or they may be down to their last dime and hungry, too. But you will seldom find one who is not invincible and hence companionable, and it seems to me that in this age of standardization the tripes and keisters and pitchmen bold, are to be blessed for adding variety to the great American selling game.

R

IGHT at this moment, I know of five people, all capable and formerly well employed, who cannot find anything to do. One of these, a woman, up to a year or so ago, always in demand and in work, to-day finds it impossible to get a job of any kind. She applied, recently, to the Telephone Company and to a large department store in the town where she is personally known as a capable worker. At both places she was shown long waiting lists. Her name was added, but that was all that could be done for her. Her experience elsewhere was the same, and the other four people had similar experiences.

Moreover, during the past two years and more, whenever I have been brought in contact with a case of unemployment the story has been the same, a great volume of business, but no vacant jobs. Yet, on all hands, if the financial papers and financial pages of the daily papers are to be credited, is prosperity and again nothing but prosperity. The stock-market having reached. -some considerable time ago the limit beyond which no stock market had ever gone before or ever could have been expected to go, continued to go higher. Financial authorities issued warnings; statisticians issued figures;

brokerage houses issued bulletins and "flashes," all designed to show that the limit of expansion had been reached, and that the inevitable period of recession was on the way.

But the stock-market just took no notice. It went higher still.

It is still, at the time of writing, going higher. Only the other day a prominent Wall Street operator remarked to me with a sigh, "For two years now I have been waiting for a recession in the market, yet the prices to-day make the prices of two years ago look like the shore at ebbtide." Business, in the aggregate, is booming as business has never boomed before, yet here are my five people who cannot get jobs, andfor so I later discovered-there are hundreds and thousands of others like them.

Then again, I used occasionally to take a walk through the financial district during the lunch-hour. Thousands and thousands of young men and women all with jobs! Hundreds and hundreds of middle-aged men with splendid businesses supplying the thousands and thousands of young men and women with jobs! Why should my five people be unable to get jobs? Each one of these thousands of young men and women must have got his job sometime.