When I returned from Europe, the ship had scarcely scraped its dock before I began worrying because I didn't have a job. Actually, a solvent family, a comforting number of generous friends, and a reasonable chance of earning my own living, stood firmly between me and starvation. But I had the quaint notion that if I didn't get an a pay roll promptly my only alternative was the bread line, with a vitamin deficiency, scurvy, and the immediate decalcification of all my bones.
Carefully preserved throughout my journey was a letter in my purse which introduced me, with some flattering phrases, to the field secretary of a large national girls' organization whose headquarters were in Chicago. I had operated for four summers on the Pacific Coast as a counselor in the camps of this organization, according to the Los Angeles executive, my work was highly satisfactory. She had used me in various capacities-camp craft, handicraft, swimming, hiking, etc. The children liked me and I had no discipline problems. Aside from the fact that I couldn't light a fire by rubbing two sticks together and wasn't particularly quick-tongued at naming all the feathered friends who winged over, I had an honorable record behind me.
In fact, the Los Angeles executive was sufficiently impressed to express the opinion that I had something of a talent for leading the young. She encouraged me to consider seriously the possibility of a career in her organization. With this in mind, she equipped me with the introduction and suggested that I stop over in Chicago on my return long enough to discuss the matter with the national executive.
Although I had gotten an alluring sniff of printer's ink and fancied the idea of flourishing a press card in the faces of policemen guarding recently murdered corpses, I still was not averse to considering an offer along more uplifting lines. The national economy, as well as my own, being what it was, I was eager, in fact, to consider anything. I squandered two days in Chicago for this mission.
With due respect for my first interview, I scrubbed myself into a fine scent and shine, manicured my nails, gargled Listerine, touched my face chastely with makeup, arrayed myself in tailored navy blue with the traditional touches of starched white, and went forth with my letter clutched in a properly gloved hand. I was not overconfident. In fact, I was terrified. But my qualms were only those of facing a new experience. I didn't actually expect to be hired on the spot. since jobs at that time were about as plentiful as crown jewels floating in the gutter. But I thought de chances were fair that I would be turned down with sincere regret. I had seen a good many of the sturdily built spinsters in their healthy shoes and middy blouses who gave forth their light in the name of this organization. Frankly, I felt that the sight of me, sleek and slim and all abloom with red corpuscles, might even inspire the lofty national secretary into a few ladylike cheers.
I was completely unprepared for the blasting brushoff I got. I've never experienced one like it since, I am glad to say. I hope no other handicapped person in the world ever emerged from his first job interview as thoroughly banged up emotionally as I was. Three or four such shiny moments in a row would have settled me permanently in a back room cutting out paper dolls. The incredible aspect of the situation was not that the Leader of Youth sincerely believed that it would be impossible for me to carry one of her torches on crutches, but that she told me off with a hiss that would have done credit to a desert diamondback rattlesnake.
I handed her my letter in the reception room where she was introduced to me by one of her henchmen. She had just returned from luncheon--an interlude which I suspect she spent stuffing herself with chocolate eclairs. It may even have been indigestion, not malice. that motivated her.
She did not invite me into her office, nor did she sit down or suggest that I sit down. I was all primed modestly to mention my I.Q., my college honors, my .church affiliation, and the names of several sterling characters who thought I was just dandy. But she didn't ask me any questions. She scanned the letter briefly and dropped it on a table. Then she let me have it with two guns, shot straight from her generous hips.
She told me that with my horrible handicap I should never for a moment consider an active job that involved leadership of young people or contact with the public. Her implication was not only that I was halt but that the very sight of me would warp a sensitive young mind.
In frantic haste to justify my mad entertainment of such ridiculous heresy, I tried to tell her how fast I could swim, how far I could hike, and all about my four summers in camp and the serenely happy and uncomplicated reactions of all the children I had shepherded.
I didn't talk very well because there was a sob suffocating its lonely self in my tight throat. I finally left and walked twenty-two blocks to my hotel rather than get in a taxi and let the driver see me cry. Feverishly I condemned my father. Mr. Fultz, my high school teachers, and my college professors for misleading me with the ludicrous myth that I had not only a fair, but a better-than-average chance for success in the economic world.
This woman who had so brashly told me the Truth was the head of an organization founded on Christian principles whose sole purpose for existence--aside from supplying salaries to her and others of her ilk-- was helping girls who were not many years younger than I. Where else could I possibly expect a gentler reception and a more cautiously kind letdown than right there?
The very thought of what a hard-boiled newspaper editor would say to me when I brazenly asked him for a job terrorized my nights. If I had only started out on one of those hard-boiled editors, what a difference it would have made in my psychology! I've been turned down by some of the reputably toughest and most artistically blasphemous editors in the business, but not one of them ever took the spring out of my step and sent me home to sop up my tears in a pillow. Compared to that first female werewolf who bared her teeth at me, the editors were a frolicking bunch of cozy, cuddly lambs.
When I finally got home to Los Angeles, I was scared of my one-legged shadow. I bit my tongue with my chattering teeth many a time during the next month while I job-hunted. Nobody advertised for help in those days. Father gave me exclusive use of his car and I drove all over Southern California. apologetically peddling my talents to suburban and small-town newspapers.
I am sure I don't know how many--if any--editors turned me down because I used crutches. None of them inflamed my nerves by admitting to that point of view anyway. They all put whipped cream and maraschino cherries on their refusals. Everyone gave me a real hearing, comfortably seated, with plenty of time and advice thrown in free.
One editor did hint that the crutches might prove a hindrance to my career, but he made the comment under the most comforting circumstances possible. "One of my reporters is leaving to be married in three months." he told me. "I'll hold the job for you, unless you let me know that you're satisfactorily located elsewhere by that time."
Then he went on: "I think you'd do very well here. This is a small town and I imagine you make friends readily. I'd love to have you work for me. You'd never get anywhere on this paper, however. There's just no place to get, and I expect you have large ambitions. Frankly, I think you should be advised that a big metropolitan daily probably would hold your crutches against you in a straight reportorial job. It's a pretty lively business."
He could have told me I was cross-eyed at that point, however, and it wouldn't have ruffled me a bit He was my dream man-dear old septuagenarian that he was, with his bald pate and silver-rimmed spectacles. He'd offered me a job with a salary. Twenty dollars a week-for that he could burn me on an altar if he had a mind to.
I didn't have to wait for that job. however. Three days later the California Newspaper Publishers Association notified me that the Citizen in Covina, twenty miles from Los Angeles, needed a reporter. I phoned for an appointment with the editor James Wickizer, a young man fresh from the Columbia School of Journalism and determinedly precise and full of progressive ideas. He practically swore me in on a style book.
Two hours later I sat down at a typewriter and began knocking out the most dangerous of all small-town copy, the society news (pink-pink-pink-flowers candles and ice cream). I rented a spare bedroom for fifteen dollars a month from the local sheriffs' wife, opened a bank account with the fifty dollars Father gave me for a stake in life, and, poor fool that I am, I've been self-supporting ever since.
I never did forge ahead to my ambition--a by-line on a front-page murder story in the New York Times. I was detoured by a variety of positions that were laid out on salvers and served to me. I stayed just a year on the newspaper and then went back to Claremont, my college town, to marry my professor and take a proffered job in the Admissions Department of Scripps College. There, subsequently, I also assisted Dr. Mary Eyre, a psychologist, with a mental hygiene clinic and a child-guidance center.
I doubt if the editors of large metropolitan dailies tossed sleeplessly when I was lost to the newspaper world. They probably never would have flung themselves at my foot with pleas that I work for them. But I did discover during my year of reporting that the handicap was a help,not a hindrance, to my trade.
In the first place, crutches are very disarming. They seem to have unique power to open close mouths. Women bared their secrets to me and cheerfully ripped the garments off their neighbors' souls as well. Nobody likes to turn a crippled person away from a door-not without first inviting him in to rest a bit. They asked me questions until we were cozy. Then I asked them questions and they invariably opened up.
On a few occasions I went into Los Angeles, to cover stories with a local tie-in, where I ran into the resistance and competition that characterizes city reporting. I could slip in without struggle where a pair of muscular legs wouldn't have carried a kicking prize fighter. I once stood at a carefully guarded door with the exasperated and frustrated press. The granite Horatio with the police badge didn't look as if a tender emotion could possibly sprout on his hard surface, but he reached out with his nightstick and touched me on the shoulder.
"There's a chair right inside here if you'd like to sit down while you wait." I didn't want to sit down-or wait. What I did want terribly was a sprinter's chance at the corridor on the other side of the entry. I hesitated, however. It certainly was a situation offering unfair advantage. Honor reared its haloed head.
A tweedy-looking mess standing next to me gave me a poke. "I suppose you're not tired, you sucker!" he whispered out of the corner of his mouth that wasn't occupied by pipe or chewing gum. He was a remarkable person--he could chew and smoke simultaneously. "You're young, kid, but you're never going to make a newspaper woman if you don't get in that door, rest your fanny for five seconds on that chair, and then take off. That lump isn't going to chase you because in the first place his feet hurt and in the second place he knows we'll all storm in if he does. He won't shoot you, dearie--you're a doe."
"Oh, my--" I whispered back. "But what will everyone think?"
"They're probably planning to use crutches next time themselves."
"Thanks very much--I would like to sit down" I said and walked through the entrance. My friend Baggy Tweeds was right. I touched my derriere to the chair to make it legal.
"I'm rested now." I announced forthrightly, just to give the sergeant a fighting chance; and then I was off and quite unpursued.
The reporters approved, apparently. They all yelled, "That's a girl!"
"She's only on a stinking little country sheet anyway," someone said. "That guy in the D.A.'s office is from her town. They probably don't go to press till next Thursday."
That was right on the nose. The L.A. papers had the story on the street three days before our paper was laid out in the forms. But nobody can ever argue me out of the conviction that crutches aren't a handy accessory to a reporter's costume.
And now, page Ripley! That blasting initial interview I had in Chicago netted me a job. It was the damned-out crutches that did it. too. I had been performing on the newspaper for only a few weeks when I got a letter, postmarked New York, from a total stranger. A minor and more benign executive who had overheard that fatal brush-off repeated it, in substance, to an acquaintance. She picked precisely the proper ears into which to pour her story. A two-crutch man himself, Edward Hungerford of the New York Central Railroad. regarded me, I suspect, as a cause. Any insult to crutch-users stirred his fighting blood like a battle hymn.
He wrote me, sight unseen, that he was building an organization to stage "Wings of a Century." a big transportation pageant at the Century of Progress and that he felt there might be a place for me if I were interested. He would interview me on his next trip to California and in the meantime, if I cared to consider his offer, please submit credentials. I submitted.
Two years later when the big bulldozers moved in on Michigan's lake front, I moved in on Chicago. It was a swell job. I worked on publicity and watched the Fair sprout out of the barren ground, and flower.
Among a few things that I learned from the Century of Progress, I will pass one profitable trifle on to posterity. A one-legger can make a fool out of a weight guesser. Scattered around the midway and in odd corners of the fairgrounds were a smattering of minor concessionaires whose equipment consisted of s swing- like seat attached to a set of scales, a stack of two- pound boxes of stale candy, and some horrible pallid Kewpie dolls. plus the brains in their heads. These bright boys offered, for a price, to guess your weight within three pounds. Failing to do this, They paid off in their pretty premiums. Their technique was to feel the arms of their victims, look pensive a minute, and then state the approximate avoirdupois. They didn't throw their weights around either. They were hitting very close to the bull's-eye.
There is nothing so hard as a crutch user's biceps. He walks on his arms, and it's fine exercise for developing muscle. I've often wished wistfully that I had an excuse to pack a wallop to someone's jaw, just to test my own strength.
The first weight guesser who fell into my trap was collecting quarters at a great rate and hanging onto his horrible wares. I stepped up and he felt my arm and gave me a respectful bow. "Solid," he announced.
He made no allowances for my soft places--and he apparently didn't consider just how much a well-set-up gam weighs. He guessed me 132 pounds--just 27 pounds over.
I played every weight guesser on the grounds, for a sucker. The winnings, however, a carload of ghastly chalky grinning Kewpies and the inedible chocolates, were hardly worth the effort.
It was at the Fair in Chicago that I met an engineer who built for me what he called "The Royal Nonesuch ne Plus Ultra Pedal Coordinator" for my car. This kindly genius decided that although I drove a standard car skillfully, using the technique of throwing my car out of gear, before pushing on the foot brake, that both the public and I would be considerably safer if my clutch and brake were coordinated. This was prior to the marketing of the Bendix free-wheeling device which, in spite of some weaknesses, subsequently proved a boon to one-legged drivers.
With a great deal of trouble and expense, and with clever ingenuity, my friend invented, built, and installed a brake and clutch coordinator in my car. It was designed to fit a Model A Ford and was highly successful, but unfortunately it was not transferable to another make. I did, however, have Bendix install free-wheeling in a Chevrolet that I owned later.
At the present time I drive a car with standard equipment. Come the millennium, however, I hope to possess the new Oldsmobile with the best of all devices for safe one-legged operation-the hydramatic drive. The Cadillac, to which I frankly don't aspire, also has this exceedingly efficient feature.
Insurance companies are a bit cool in their reception of handicapped drivers. Even with a spotless record and a fistful of operators' licenses from a variety of states staring them in the face, they are reluctant to write policies for onelegged drivers. I have always managed to get coverage, but I have shopped around for it and I have gone through some devilishly contrived tests to prove my skill.
The handicapped drivers that I know, all share my exceptional caution behind the wheel of a car. They realize, as I do, that in a court case, a one-legger would have a tough time convincing a jury that he wasn't at fault, irrespective of the circumstances of accident. The new automatic clutch in the Oldsmobile and the Cadillac should eliminate this prejudice completely.