Cheaper by the dozen, p.3
Cheaper by the Dozen, page 3
“Well, they come cheaper by the dozen, you know.”
This was designed to bring down the house, and usually it did. Dad had a good sense of theater, and he’d try to time this apparent ad lib so that it would coincide with the change in traffic. While the peasantry was chuckling, the Pierce Arrow would buck away in clouds of gray smoke, while the professor up front rendered a few bars of Honk Honk Kadookah.
Leave ’em in stitches, that was us.
Dad would use that same “cheaper by the dozen” line whenever we stopped at a toll gate, or went to a movie, or bought tickets for a train or boat.
“Do my Irishmen come cheaper by the dozen?” he’d ask the man at the toll bridge. Dad could take one look at a man and know his nationality.
“Irishmen is it? And I might have known it. Lord love you, and it takes the Irish to raise a crew of redheaded Irishmen like that. The Lord Jesus didn’t mean for any family like that to pay toll on my road. Drive through on the house.”
“If he knew you were a Scot he’d take a shillalah and wrap it around your tight-fisted head,” Mother giggled as we drove on.
“He probably would,” Dad agreed. “Bejabers.”
And one day at the circus.
“Do my Dutchmen come cheaper by the dozen?”
“Dutchmen? Ach. And what a fine lot of healthy Dutchmen.”
“Have you heard the story about the man with the big family who took his children to the circus?” asked Dad. “‘My kids want to see your elephants,’ said the man. ‘That’s nothing,’ replied the ticket-taker, ‘my elephants want to see your kids.’”
“I heard it before,” said the circus man. “Often. Just go in that gate over there where there ain’t no turnstile.”
Mother only drew the line once at Dad’s scenes in Foolish Carriage. That was in Hartford, Connecticut, right in the center of town. We had just stopped at a traffic sign, and the usual crowd was beginning to collect. We heard the words plainly from a plump lady near the curb.
“Just look at those poor, adorable little children,” she said. “Don’t they look sweet in their uniforms?”
Dad was all set to go into a new act—the benevolent superintendent taking the little orphan tykes out for a drive.
“Why, bless my soul and body,” he began loudly, in a jovial voice. “Why, bless my buttons. Why, bless …”
But for once Mother exploded.
“That,” she said, “is the last straw. Positively and emphatically the ultimate straw.”
This was something new, and Dad was scared. “What’s the matter, Lillie?” he asked quickly.
“Not the penultimate, nor yet the ante-penultimate,” said Mother. “But the ultimate.”
“What’s the matter, Lillie? Speak to me, girl.”
“The camel’s back is broken,” Mother said. “Someone has just mistaken us for an orphanage.”
“Oh, that,” said Dad. “Sure, I know it. Wasn’t it a scream?”
“No,” said Mother. “It wasn’t.”
“It’s these dusters we have to wear,” Anne almost wept. “It’s these damned, damned dusters. They look just like uniforms.”
“Honestly, Daddy,” said Ernestine, “it’s so embarrassing to go riding when you always make these awful scenes.”
The crowd was bigger than ever now.
“I,” said Martha, “feel like Lady Godiva.”
Mother was upset, but not too upset to reprimand Anne for swearing. Dad started to shake with laughter, and the crowd started laughing, too.
“That’s a good one,” somebody shouted. “Lady Godiva. You tell him, Sis. Lady Godiva!”
The boys began showing off. Bill sat on the top of the back seat as if he were a returning hero being cheered by a welcoming populace. He waved his hat aloft and bowed graciously to either side, with a fixed, stagey smile on his face. Frank and Fred swept imaginary ticker tape off his head and shoulders. But the girls, crimson-faced, dived under the lap robe.
“Get down from there, Bill,” said Mother.
Dad was still roaring. “I just don’t understand you girls,” he wheezed. “That’s the funniest thing I ever heard in my life. An orphanage on wheels. And me the superintendent. Gilbreth’s Retreat for the Red-Haired Offspring of Unwed but Repentant Reprobates.”
“Not humorous,” said Mother. “Let’s get out of here.”
As we passed through the outskirts of Hartford, Dad was subdued and repentant; perhaps a little frightened.
“I didn’t mean any harm, Lillie,” he said.
“Of course you didn’t, dear. And there’s no harm done.”
But Ernestine wasn’t one to let an advantage drop.
“Well, we’re through with the dusters,” she announced from the back seat. “We’ll never wear them again. Never again. Quoth the raven, and I quoth, ‘Nevermore,’ and I unquoth.”
Dad could take it from Mother, but not from his daughters.
“Who says you’re through with the dusters?” he howled. “Those dusters cost a lot of money, which does not grow on grape arbors. And if you think for a minute that—”
“No, Frank,” Mother interrupted. “This time the girls are right. No more dusters.”
It was a rare thing for them to disagree, and we all sat there enjoying it.
“All right, Lillie,” Dad grinned, and everything was all right now. “As I always say, you’re the boss. And I unquoth, too.”
4
Visiting Mrs. Murphy
ROADS WEREN’T MARKED VERY well in those days, and Dad never believed in signs anyway.
“Probably some kid has changed those arrows around,” he would say, possibly remembering his own youth. “Seems to me that if we turned that way, the way the arrow says, we’d be headed right back where we came from.”
The same thing happened with the Automobile Blue Book, the tourist’s bible in the early days of the automobile. Mother would read to him:
“Six-tenths of a mile past windmill, bear left at brick church, and follow paved road.”
“That must be the wrong windmill,” Dad would say. “No telling when the fellow who wrote that book came over this road to check up on things. My bump of direction tells me to turn right. They must have torn down the windmill the book’s talking about.”
Then, after he’d turned right and gotten lost, he’d blame Mother for giving him the wrong directions. Several times, he called Anne up to the front seat to read the Blue Book for him.
“Your Mother hasn’t a very good sense of direction,” he’d say loudly, glaring over his pince-nez at Mother. “She tells me to turn left when the book says to turn right. Then she blames me when we get lost. Now you read it to me just like it says. Don’t change a single word, understand? And don’t be making up anything about windmills that aren’t there, or non-existent brick churches, just to confuse me. Read it just like it says.”
But he wouldn’t follow Anne’s directions, either, and so he’d get lost just the same.
When things looked hopeless, Dad would ask directions at a store or filling station. He’d listen, and then usually drive off in exactly the opposite direction from the one his informant had indicated.
“Old fool,” Dad would mutter. “He’s lived five miles from Trenton all his life and he doesn’t even know how to get there. He’s trying to route me back to New York.”
Mother was philosophical about it. Whenever she considered that Dad was hopelessly lost, she’d open a little portable ice box that she kept on the floor of the car under her feet, and hand Jane her bottle. This was Mother’s signal that it was time to have lunch.
“All right, Lillie,” Dad would say. “Guess we might as well stop and eat, while I get my bearings. You pick out a good place for a picnic.”
While we were eating, Dad would keep looking around for something that might be interesting. He was a natural teacher, and believed in utilizing every minute. Eating, he said, was “unavoidable delay.” So were dressing, face-washing, and hair-combing. “Unavoidable delay” was not to be wasted.
If Dad found an ant hill, he’d tell us about certain colonies of ants that kept slaves and herds of cows. Then we’d take turns lying on our stomachs, watching the ants go back and forth picking up crumbs from sandwiches.
“See, they all work and they don’t waste anything,” Dad would say, and you could tell that the ant was one of his favorite creatures. “Look at the teamwork, as four of them try to move that piece of meat. That’s motion study for you.”
Or he’d point out a stone wall and say it was a perfect example of engineering. He’d explain about how the glaciers passed over the earth many years ago, and left the stone when they melted.
If a factory was nearby, he’d explain how you used a plumb line to get the chimney straight and why the windows had been placed a certain way to let in the maximum light. If the factory whistle blew, he’d take out his stopwatch and time the difference between when the steam appeared and when we heard the sound.
“Now take out your notebooks and pencils and I’ll show you how to figure the speed of sound,” he’d say.
He insisted that we make a habit of using our eyes and ears every single minute.
“Look there,” he’d say. “What do you see? Yes, I know, it’s a tree. But look at it. Study it. What do you see?”
But it was Mother who spun the stories that made the things we studied really unforgettable. If Dad saw motion study and teamwork in an ant hill, Mother saw a highly complex civilization governed, perhaps, by a fat old queen who had a thousand black slaves bring her breakfast in bed mornings. If Dad stopped to explain the construction of a bridge, she would find the workman in his blue jeans, eating his lunch high on the top of the span. It was she who made us feel the breathless height of the structure and the relative puniness of the humans who had built it. Or if Dad pointed out a tree that had been bent and gnarled, it was Mother who made us sense how the wind, eating against the tree in the endless passing of time, had made its own relentless mark.
We’d sit there memorizing every word, and Dad would look at Mother as if he was sure he had married the most wonderful person in the world.
Before we left our picnic site, Dad would insist that all of the sandwich wrappings and other trash be carefully gathered, stowed in the lunch box, and brought home for disposal.
“If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a sloppy camper,” he’d say. “We don’t want to leave a single scrap of paper on this man’s property. We’re going to leave things just like we found them, only even more so. We don’t want to overlook so much as an apple peel.”
Apple peels were a particularly sore subject. Most of us liked our apples without skins, and Dad thought this was wasteful. When he ate an apple, he consumed skin, core, and seeds, which he alleged were the most healthful and most delectable portions of the fruit. Instead of starting at the side and eating his way around the equator, Dad started at the North Pole, and ate down through the core to the South.
He didn’t actually forbid us to peel our apples or waste the cores, but he kept referring to the matter so as to let us know that he had noticed what we were doing.
Sometimes, in order to make sure that we left no rubbish behind, he’d have us form a line, like a company front in the army, and march across the picnic ground. Each of us was expected to pick up any trash in the territory that he covered.
The result was that we often came home with the leavings of countless previous picnickers.
“I don’t see how you children can possibly clutter up a place the way you do,” Dad would grin as he stuffed old papers, bottles, and rusty tin cans into the picnic box.
“That’s not our mess, Daddy. You know that just as well as we do. What would we be doing with empty whiskey bottles and a last year’s copy of the Hartford Courant?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” he’d say, while sniffing the bottles.
Neither Dad nor Mother thought filling station toilets were sanitary. They never elaborated about just what diseases the toilets contained, but they made it plain that the ailments were both contagious and dire. In comparison, leprosy would be no worse than a bad cold. Dad always opened the door of a public rest room with his coattail, and the preparations and precautions that ensued were “unavoidable delay” in its worst aspect.
Once he and Mother had discarded filling stations as a possibility, the only alternative was the woods. Perhaps it was the nervous strain of enduring Dad’s driving; perhaps it was simply that fourteen persons have different personal habits. At any rate, we seemed to stop at every promising clump of trees.
“I’ve seen dogs that paid less attention to trees,” Dad used to groan.
For family delicacy, Dad coined two synonyms for going to the bathroom in the woods. One was “visiting Mrs. Murphy.” The other was “examining the rear tire.” They meant the same thing.
After a picnic, he’d say:
“How many have to visit Mrs. Murphy?”
Usually nobody would. But after we had been under way ten or fifteen minutes, someone would announce that he had to go. So Dad would stop the car, and Mother would take the girls into the woods on one side of the road, while Dad took the boys into the woods on the other.
“I know every piece of flora and fauna from Bangor, Maine, to Washington, D.C.!” Dad exclaimed bitterly.
On the way home, when it was dark, Bill used to crawl up into a swivel seat right behind Dad. Every time Dad was intent on steering while rounding a curve, Bill would reach forward and clutch his arm. Bill was a perfect mimic, and he’d whisper in Mother’s voice, “Not so fast, Frank. Not so fast.” Dad would think it was Mother grabbing his arm and whispering to him, and he’d make believe he didn’t hear her.
Sometimes Bill would go into the act when the car was creeping along at a dignified thirty, and Dad finally would turn to Mother disgustedly and say:
“For the love of Mike, Lillie! I was only doing twenty.”
He automatically subtracted ten miles an hour from the speed whenever he discussed the matter with Mother.
“I didn’t say anything, Frank,” Mother would tell him.
Dad would turn around, then, and see all of us giggling into our handkerchiefs. He’d give Bill a playful cuff and rumple his hair. Secretly, Dad was proud of Bill’s imitations. He used to say that when Bill imitated a bird he (Dad) didn’t dare to look up.
“You’ll be the death of me yet, boy,” Dad would say to Bill.
As we’d roll along, we’d sing three-and four-part harmony, with Mother and Dad joining in as soprano and bass. “Bobolink Swinging on the Bow,” “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” “Our Highland Goat,” “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”
“What do only children do with themselves?” we’d think.
Dad would lean back against the seat and cock his hat on the side of his head. Mother would snuggle up against him as if she were cold. The babies were asleep now. Sometimes Mother turned around between songs and said to us: “Right now is the happiest time in the world.” And perhaps it was.
5
Mister Chairman
DAD WAS BORN IN Fairfield, Maine, where his father ran a general store, farmed, and raised harness-racing horses. John Hiram Gilbreth died in 1871, leaving his three-year-old son, two older daughters, and a stern and rockbound widow.
Dad’s mother, Grandma Gilbreth, believed that her children were fated to make important marks in the world, and that her first responsibility was to educate them so they would be prepared for their rendezvous with destiny.
“After that,” she told her Fairfield neighbors, with a knowing nod, “blood will tell.”
Without any business ties to hold her in Maine, she moved to Andover, Massachusetts, so that the girls could attend Abbott Academy. Later, when her oldest daughter showed a talent for music, Grandma Gilbreth decided to move again. Every New Englander knew the location of the universe’s seat of culture, and it was to Boston that she now journeyed with her flock.
Dad wanted, more than anything else, to be a construction engineer, and his mother planned to have him enter Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the time he finished high school, though, he decided this would be too great a drain on the family finances, and would interfere with his sisters’ studies. Without consulting his mother, he took a job as a bricklayer’s helper.
Once the deed was done, Grandma Gilbreth decided to make the best of it. After all, Mr. Lincoln had started by splitting rails.
“But if you’re going to be a bricklayer’s helper,” she said, “for mercy sakes be a good bricklayer’s helper.”
“I’ll do my best to find a good bricklayer to help,” Dad grinned.
If Grandma thought Dad was going to be a good helper, his new foreman thought he was the worst he had encountered in forty years, man and boy, of bricklaying.
During Dad’s first week at work he made so many suggestions about how brick could be laid faster and better that the foreman threatened repeatedly to fire him.
“You’re the one who came here to learn,” the foreman hollered at him. “For Christ’s sake don’t try to learn us.”
Subtle innuendoes like that never worried Dad. Besides, he already knew that motion study was his element, and he had discovered something that apparently had never attracted the attention of industry before. He tried to explain it to the foreman.
“Did you ever notice that no two men use exactly the same way of laying bricks?” he asked. “That’s important, and do you know why?”
“I know that if you open your mouth about bricklaying again, I’ll lay a brick in it.”
“It’s important because if one bricklayer is doing the job the right way, then all the others are doing the job the wrong way. Now, if I had your job, I’d find who’s laying brick the right way, and make all the others copy him.”
“If you had my job,” shouted the livid-faced foreman, “the first thing you’d do is fire the red-headed unprintable son of a ruptured deleted who tried to get your job. And that’s what I think you’re trying to do.”
