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had to be used in the construction of and right thinking. As one man said: such tables.

Everyone employed in Muskegon by this company is American either by birth or declaration and yet every type of mind is employed. You have the disciplinarian, the doctor, the lawyer; specialists in rubber-making; stationary, electric, and chemical engineers; three generations of cabinetmakers practically working side by side; and every kind of chemist because accuracy is the key word. The organization, the men, the material must be accurate, since the finished product goes to Patagonia, the Hebrides, the Straits Settlements, the courts of Europe, the homes of the rich, the billiard halls of the ordinary men and women of the world.

These goods are valueless without accuracy accuracy that meets the atmospheric conditions of the climate and the peculiar temperament of the world player. You have this accuracy reflected in the people at work. You note ample, large space for each one no bustle, rushings, turmoil. The men tell you that they become more and more interested in the work. You read your shorthand notes at night after interviewing eighty-three men and you read everywhere practically the same thought: the men and the company work together; each is doing well. The men work on the premium system that practically has increased wages; they do better work because the company studies in the various laboratories improvements that are tested, worked out, and given to the men as time savers, as well as accuracy preservers. Paternalism is unknown here; the men and the officers of the company join in safety self-help organization. Men bring their sons, whose sons in turn join the company in special undertakings. The spirit of democracy prevails; it is not made a fetish or proclaimed - it just is. The atmosphere of discipline is going hand in hand with right action

"I never heard of anyone being illtreated around here. We all can and do stay as long as we want and we always have a job. We don't worry about age or new things hurting us; the company wants us and we want the job. We can make arrangements for a home and just what we want, knowing it's coming out just right. Eighty-seven of the men who began here with the company had a loyalty dinner, and they were of the first five hundred that began the first year here."

In the making of a city comes the assurance of progress. The BrunswickBalke-Collender Company do a business of more than $25,000,000 a year. The work is now really concerned with fundamentals: every type of mind nowadays sets apart a time for recreation, and the company makes the necessities for it. Singularly, too, the billiard table, the bowling-alley, the phonograph, the radio, the new Panatrope, all keep the family together. In many places one finds entire families enjoying public billiards, public bowling; they are thereby held together under the most favorable conditions. The company is not adverse to employing any type of mind, yet it always gets its managers, officers, and guides from the ranks. What seems to be destined for world-wide use is the new musical reproducer, the Panatrope-by the light wave method of recording vibrations, as low as 16 per second and as high as 10,000 per second are recorded. This means the artist plays naturally and that you actually hear him without seeing. Your home is in touch with the world.

In addition to giving you health, recreation, mental joy, and world knowledge, the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company have, in the making of a city, added the spirit of right thinking. There is every reason to say that revived Muskegon is built on a lasting foundation.

INSTITUTIONAL PUBLICITY

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APRIL, 1926

OLYMPIANS IN HOMESPUN

BY LUCIEN PRICE

It used to amuse me to think that the tale which follows would make a lively bit of romantic fiction. I still think so; but I have come to believe that the plain fact is better. Were this to be told as fiction, it would lose half its force. These deeds were done. They were done against heavy odds by quite common people. Half a century and more ago, in a small town, bleak, drab, and humdrum, miles from anywhere, beset with business cares and household duties, these people addressed themselves with pluck and energy to what is, I suppose, one of the major issues of life. And they well-nigh solved it.

I hear it said that we live in a bad time: that traditional religion is played out; that youth has gone on the loose; that our people do not know how to use leisure creatively; that life has been mechanized out of all simplicity and beauty; and that the machinery of human slaughter has slipped the leash of social control. All this may be true. But, instead of doing the Jeremiah act, it seems more practical to suggest a remedy. People say: 'We have been told often enough that we are commonplace. We know that. But what can we do about it?' I wonder if the story of these common people in a small town domesticating

VOL 187-NO. 4

A

the immortals and weaving their Elysium of homespun does not tell us at least one of the things that we can do about it.

I

On a morning in 1871, when apple orchards were pink and white, young Dr. Ripley drove into town with his bride. They had been married the day before in her father's farmhouse at the Falls.

On the parlor wall behind the bridal pair as they stood to face the minister, you might have seen, and still may see, two oval-framed portraits, the bride's grandparents a severe old New Englander who had hewn his farm out of a Middle-Western oak forest, and a serious old woman, cousin to Mary Lyon, foundress of Mount Holyoke College. She had brought her books along with her into the wilderness, and had in very deed kept the wolf, not from the door, but from the blanket stretched across an opening in the log cabin which served for a door. Her husband having driven twenty miles to mill, she sat up all night feeding a roaring blaze on her hearth which kept the beasts away. Her daughter, a village schoolmistress who had learned to parse out of Young's Night Thoughts and who knew whole pages of Paradise Lost by heart,

married another of these Connecticut farmers who had migrated to the Fire Lands of the Western Reserve. Thus it was that the bride had grown up in a household with a rugged, if homespun, intellectual tradition. She had even been taught to sing by a sister of the poet Sill, who had studied in New York with no lesser luminary than Carlo Bassini. Carlo had much to answer for, but his 'method' was then and thereabouts the best obtainable.

The doctor's parents were strict Quakers and staunch Abolitionists. As a boy he had earned money in harvest fields and bought a violin on which he secretly learned to play. When his parents found it out, they forced him to destroy the instrument. On the other hand his father, also a country doctor, stationed at the head of a stairway in a disused sawmill where two runaway slaves were hidden, had stood off a crew of plantationowners with his gold-headed cane.

The younger Dr. Ripley, at the age of eighteen, had left the medical school of the University of Michigan to fight under General Grant, who remained, to the end of his days, one of his heroes. His other, as time went on, became Theodore Thomas. A man has many fathers, and, as the years sped, by some law of spiritual similitude the good gray doctor grew to look not unlike both these sires of his spirit.

His wooing had been, like himself, whimsically abrupt and offhand. He would be missing for weeks. Suddenly one morning he would drive into the farmyard, past the smoke-bush, in his two-wheeled gig, or perhaps on horseback, medicine cases in saddlebags. He was late to his wedding. Five minutes past the hour he arrived, his horse in a lather. There was an epidemic of scarlet fever at the Wick. Leave without visiting every one of his patients? Not even for his own

wedding! The seven-mile buggy-ride to Woolwick was their wedding journey. I say buggy: it was not a carriage, for, although it was brand-new for the occasion, a vehicle with a top was an extravagance which they could not yet afford.

No sooner were they wedded than they were forced to decide whether whist and dancing could satisfy hungry minds and immortal souls. They de cided not. This was thought 'queer.' In the same village were three other families similarly queer. One was that of the minister, Reverend Alan Burroughs. He came of a stock locally celebrated for producing scholars, schoolmasters, editors, professors, and college presidents. He himself had been a college professor, but thought he needed a plunge into common life as a country parson. One of his recreations was to drive with the doctor on his round of sick-calls, through greengolden countrysides, discussing all things human and divine. He lived in a commodious white farmhouse up the river road, under broadbrimmed maples, with a wife who was a brilliant pianist, and a numerous brood of children who variously played, sang, or drew.

The other two families were the Willetts and the Dacys, partner owners of the glass-factory. Their houses stood side by side halfway up Presbyterian Hill at a height commanding wide sweeps of lawn bordered with curving driveways, a grove of shimmering willows on one hand, plantations of fir and beech on the other. The Willetts' house, narrow and tall, was painted yellow, its cornices encrusted with wedding-cake carpentry; the Dacys', painted gray, was one of those peak-gabled mansions, ornate with the trefoil and quatrefoil, the clustered chimneys, and the pointed windows of that wooden Gothic which invaded America in the 1850's, with

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