Note you say you are not meeting with the success you expected to, in your present campaign and you attribute it to several causes, among them a consumers' hunger strike, conservative buying and lack of effort on the part of the salesmen.
Well--now, of course, the Old Man may not know as much about it as you do, but from several other statements you made in your letter, I'm wondering if you have really struck the _real reason_.
I don't want to misjudge you, Boy, but those reasons you give are becoming so much of a chestnut to me--I've heard 'em so often that I'm pretty sure I know their origin. I know that during the holidays--just before Christmas--you could hear those records being played on almost any talking machine that you cared to listen to, but I thought surely, with the coming of the New Year you'd forget the “Stove League Chatter” and chase “Old Man Gloom” out into the sunshine.
You know, I'm reminded of a fellow I used to know when I wore knee breeches. Tom Foreman was a boy who was raised in our town and who never knew what it was to run off to go swimming, rob a melon patch or play hookey. His folks always dressed him nice and he was a fair student in school, but he never batted over about a hundred and twenty-six in the back alley league, so, of course, there was no farewell reception tendered him by “the gang” when his folks decided to send him away to college.
Tom would come back to town for vacations for a brief visit, but somehow or other his schooling didn't seem to humanize him any and each time he came he seemed to be just a little more “uppish” than the time before, but he was very fond of airing his superior wisdom--sort of casting his pearls before swine, as it were, even though we didn't give him any encores.
In this particular vicinity the only game that was available was a few cotton-tails and an occasional Jack Rabbit in the winter time, so that hunting had become a lost art and the sportively inclined always looked to some other sort of amusement.
We never knew exactly how it happened, but it seemed like the boys of the Eata Bita Pie Fraternity or whatever it was, got to talking about hunting big game over their pipes one night and Tom suddenly developed one of his bright ideas which had been heretofore extinct and he took to bragging to his fellow pie-biters about the exceptionally good hunting that was available in the vicinity of his old home town. Although this was in the days before prohibition, Tom had never seriously gone in for tonsil irrigation, yet it must have been something that made him wax eloquent, for the first thing we knew he had brought four embryo captains of industry down to our town, all dressed up like a Roosevelt African party and they announced their intention of going out on a big hunt. Tom, of course, was too learned to ask any of the home-guard any questions, so they started out one spring morning in full regalia.