Tom DeForest started his restaurant career with a push-cart, peddling hamburgers and beans of evenings, while studying law during the day — just to please his father. The hamburger and bean business grew beyond all expectations—and Tom soon forgot about his father’s wish that he study law. Tom did not travel the streets with his push-cart. He stored it back of a bank building in the daytime, and brought it out only of evenings — keeping late hours, and quite often “wee” hours. When he housed the business at 2420 North Broadway, it became “Ptomaine Tommy’s Place.” And it continued to grow. The name made it famous. Tom told me he could sell the business for $100,000—but he didn’t know what to do with the money. Then, too, I suspect, the complicated income tax demands was also a deterrent. That’s what has stopped Jim Leibig — another Wetmore boy who has made good, at Santa Ana — from turning a big profit. I think Jim could clean up with as much, or maybe more, than Tom.
Tom DeForest has leased the business to his former help for a percentage of the profits. He goes to the place only once every day now, (12 o’clock, noon), to check up — and gather in the cash. Pretty soft, Tommy—pretty soft.
Now, was there ever another man like Henry Clay DeForest? Certainly not in Wetmore. Mr. Henry was my hero, had been so since the time of his partnership here with Seth Handley, when I was eleven years old, “under foot” much of the time in their establishment. And I should have liked very much to have seen his romance with Seth’s sister materialize. Although I had seen her but once, I had come to think of her as an exceptionally desirable lady, a lovely personage like her wonderful brother Seth. And though it came to naught, I still think it was, in a way, the most beautiful romance that I have ever known; with the lady waiting—waiting unto death for the clouds to roll by.
And even with the handicap of being influenced by an aristocratic mother — if it really were a handicap — Mr. Henry rose, in a community dead set against such holdings, to the heights in popularity. He was the almost perfect man — a man after my own heart, and even now it pleases me no little to remember that I had selected him as my hero early in life.