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Yankee Twang Country and Western Music in New
England 1st Edition Edition Clifford R. Murphy Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Clifford R. Murphy
ISBN(s): 9780252038679, 0252038673
Edition: 1st Edition
File Details: PDF, 2.98 MB
Year: 2014
Language: english
country and western music in new england
 yankee twang

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 music in american life

A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.

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 Yankee Twang
Country and Western Music
in New England

clifford r. murphy

university of illinois press

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

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 Publication of this book was supported by a grant
from the L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Folklore Fund.

© 2014 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Murphy, Clifford R., author.
Yankee twang: country and western music in New England / Clifford R. Murphy.
pages cm. — (Music in American life)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-252-03867-9 (cloth: alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-252-09661-7 (ebook)
1. Country music—New England—History and criticism.
I. Title.
ml3524.m87  2014
781.6420974—dc23  2014012436

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 To the many women and men of New England country
and western music: this book is for you, that the world should
know you, your music, and your contribution to the character
of New England community life.
To the memories of those who contributed so generously
to this work and who have traveled on before seeing their names
in print: Wendell Austin, Angelo Boncore, Vinny Calderone,
Bill Chinnock, Jerry Devine, Doug Garon, Flo Cody Hooper,
Gene Hooper, Clyde Joy, Herb LeBlanc, Paul Roberts Metivier,
John Penny, Rusty Rogers, Jim Senter, Johnny Smith, Rex Trailer,
John Lincoln Wright, and Richie Zack.
To the memory of my late father, Gordon D. Murphy, Jr.,
who always dreamed of publishing a book: this one’s for you.
To Mom and Peter, for always encouraging me
to follow my muse.
And, finally, to my wife, Monica, without whom my life would
be so very empty. You are profoundly beautiful by every measure.
I love you so much.

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Murphy_text.indd 6 6/11/14 8:39 AM
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue. Fieldnotes on the Dick Philbrook

and the Frye Mountain Band Show xiii

Introduction. Reintroducing New England

to the Country Music World 1
1 New England Country and Western Music
and the Myth of Southern Authenticity 11
2 A History of New England Country
and Western Music, 1925–1975 37
3 Finding Community in the New England
Country and Western Event 105
4 Home on the Grange: The Frontier between
“American” and “Immigrant” Worldviews
in New England Country and Western 124
5 “It Beats Digging Clams”: The Working Life of Country
and Western Musicians in the Barnstorming Era 145
6 The New England Cowboy: Regional Resistance
to National Culture 167
Epilogue. “Oh, You’re Canadian”: My Night as a
Canadian American in Watertown, Massachusetts 183
References 187
Index 199
Photos follow page 89.

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Murphy_text.indd 8 6/11/14 8:39 AM
 Acknowledgments

My ethnographic and historical research was informed by—and shaped

by—my having been a resident of New England from 1978 until 2008, my
family heritage in Massachusetts and Maine that stretches back in parts
some two centuries, and my having traveled extensively throughout the
region as an itinerant rock and country and western musician from 1988
through 2003. Formal research for this project began in 2004. As a bi-
musical participant-observer, I carried out ethnographic fieldwork with
country and western musicians and fans in the states of Rhode Island,
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, as well as in the Canadian
provinces of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. I
conducted oral histories with performers active (and formerly active) in all
six New England states and with pertinent persons who now reside in the
states of Tennessee, Colorado, Oklahoma, Florida, and Ohio and in the Ca-
nadian province of Nova Scotia. Oral histories were all conducted under the
auspices of the Maine Folklife Center, the Massachusetts Cultural Council,
and the American Folklife Center. Copies of fieldnotes, sound recordings,
photographs, transcriptions of interviews, and signed release/consent forms
have all been deposited in those archives as noted.
Research in historical primary sources—field recordings, commercial
recordings, photographs, oral histories, print media, radio transcriptions,
recording contracts, show posters, advertisements, fan mail, and business
documents—was conducted in the archives of the New England Country
Music Historical Society in Watertown, Massachusetts; the Maine Folklife
Center at the University of Maine, Orono; the American Folklife Center
at the Library of Congress; the Folklife and Heritage Archives of the Mas-
sachusetts Cultural Council; the New England Folk Music Archives at the
Passim Center; the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum; and the John

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 x acknowledgments

Edwards Memorial Foundation (JEMF) Collection of the Southern Folklife

Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
The archives of the now-defunct New England Country Music Historical
Society are maintained by Gordon “Country Gordy” Brown of Watertown,
Massachusetts; Mr. Brown and his archive contributed the bulk of historical
materials (rare radio transcriptions, photographs, regional commercial and
noncommercial recordings) used in this work. A series of oral histories and
field recordings conducted by folklorist Edward D. “Sandy” Ives and his an-
thropology students and interns (Greg Boardman, Lisa Feldman, and Debora
Kodish) at the University of Maine in Orono between 1975 and 1980 with
musicians, fans, and radio executives active in country and western and
hillbilly orchestra music in Maine and the Canadian Maritimes between
the 1920s and the 1980s proved an invaluable resource. These materials are
housed in the Northeast Archive of Folklife and Oral History at the Maine
Folklife Center at the University of Maine, Orono. Other items located in
the archives of the Maine Folklife Center and utilized in this work are a
series of oral histories, field recordings, and rare radio transcriptions of
Maine country and western musicians collected by folklorist Jeff “Smokey”
McKeen. I am most grateful to Maine Folklife Center director Pauleena
MacDougall for her ongoing support of this project.
The New England field recording collections of Phillips Barry, Helen
Hartness Flanders, Alan Lomax, and Eloise Hubbard Linscott housed at the
American Folklife Center and the Vermont Folklife Center were valuable in
providing historical context for this work. The Linscott collection was par-
ticularly helpful as—unlike the recordings of Barry, Flanders, and Lomax—it
contained a wide variety of styles and reflected a far more elastic definition
of “vernacular” or “folk” music worthy of recording in the 1930s and 1940s.
Linscott’s collection includes several recordings of radio broadcasts made
in 1942 by Massachusetts cowgirl yodeler Georgia Mae, as well as the only
known recordings of Maine performers like the Katahdin Mountaineers,
the Singing Smiths, and other early Maine string bands experimenting with
proto–country and western sounds. Finally, the archives of the Country
Music Hall of Fame hold several high quality rare commercial recordings
of New England artists unavailable elsewhere, as well as songbooks from
the 1930s through the 1950s of New England artists. The archives also
include oral histories conducted with Bradley Kincaid and Grandpa and
Ramona Jones (which cover their brief tenure in Massachusetts and New
Hampshire in the 1930s and 1940s) by Douglas Greene and with Kenny
and Bettyanne Roberts by John Rumble.

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 acknowledgments xi

Beyond those persons mentioned above who extended gracious and in-
sightful assistance above and beyond the call of duty, I would like to thank
the mentors, colleagues, and friends who helped to bring this book along:
Jeff Todd Titon, Maggie Holtzberg, Jennifer Post, Rose Subotnik, Pauleena
MacDougall, Pamela Dean, and Millie Rahn. And a most grateful thanks
goes to my wife, Monica, and to my friends Eric Chalek, Baynard Woods,
Nate Gibson, and Elaine Eff for offering so much editorial insight and moral
support along the way. Thank you, too, to Terry Chinnock for sharing
biographical details about her father, the late, great Dick Curless. Thanks
to Alyce Ornella and Andrew Jawitz of Rockhouse Mountain Productions
for their generosity and enthusiasm for all things Al Hawkes. And thanks
to my team at the University of Illinois Press: my editor, Laurie Matheson,
for her calm and patient guidance; and my copyeditor, Mary M. Hill, and
managing editor, Jennifer Clark, for their indefatigable dedication to quality
and good cheer. I must also add a thanks to my friends and musical col-
leagues, the late, great Say ZuZu and Hog Mawl: those thousands of hours
of conversations on tour, in living rooms and at truck stops, about all that is
righteous and good and devastating about playing music for a living—those
led me to this, and your insights and hard-won wisdom fill these pages.

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Murphy_text.indd 12 6/11/14 8:39 AM
 Prologue
fieldnotes on the dick philbrook
and the frye mountain band show

Place: Thompson Community Center, Union, Maine

DATE: AUGUST 4, 2007 The drive from Waldoboro to Union, Maine,
was as beautiful as I remembered it from two years before when I attended
the Dick Curless Memorial Scholarship Fund concert. Old coastal Colonial
houses and clam huts gave way to rolling fields of blueberries and small dairy
farms. I arrived in town around 5:30, which was the time I had arranged
to meet Yodeling Wade Dow for an interview and to make a recording of
his virtuosic cowboy yodeling. I went inside the Thompson Community
Center—a wonderfully dusty old basketball court with high rafters, a stage,
a kitchen, an ancient scoreboard with orange bulbs, and dim, rusty-red
overhead lighting. I approached the first man I saw in a western shirt with
pearl buttons to ask Wade’s whereabouts. This was—it turned out—Dick
Philbrook, the leader of the Frye Mountain Band, with whom Wade was to
be playing that night. Dick is a solid man of short stature with white hair
slicked back in a 1960s trucker style, a thick Down East brogue, a wide
smile with a front tooth cut at a sharp angle, and big, strong hands.
Dick told me that Wade had been given the night off, and he was chagrined
to find that I’d traveled all the way to Union only to be disappointed. Dick
and his girlfriend, Evelyn, tried to call Wade repeatedly, but to no avail, and
we talked awhile about country and western music in Maine. I stepped out
to look for a bite to eat, perused the snacks at the Mic-Mac Convenience
Store and a small grocery store, and took a look at the Union Fairgrounds
and the warehouses that serve as the center of Union, Maine’s blueberry
industry. I went back into the Thompson Community Center, paid the eight-
dollar cover, passed on the fifty-fifty raffle, ordered a couple of hot dogs and
a Moxie, and sat down next to Evelyn while the band began to play.
During the second song, Dick waved me over to the stage and told me to
grab my guitar out of my trunk and sit in with the band for at least one set.

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 xiv prologue

Being the youngest person by a good twenty years at least in a room (the
gymnasium in this case) full of a hundred or more people is not a feeling
I am comfortable with. Young people—particularly young people in their
twenties through forties—are so rare at these events that the regulars can’t
help but be curious about the “youngster.” I figured if I was going to stand
out that much, I might as well be playing and not sitting. So I went out to
the car, tucked in my shirt, and got my guitar.
The Dick Philbrook band wears matching white western shirts and black
pants. Dick plays electric bass and has two men playing electric guitar (both
lead) and a woman on drums. The group was very loose, and band members
traded off songs, with the singer starting the tune and the others joining in
halfway through the first verse or so. I plugged in my acoustic and played
rhythm guitar. I knew most of the songs without having ever played some
of them, and I sang lead on about one in every four or five songs—mostly
Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, and Merle Haggard songs. I got a good hand
each time, and Dick gave me high praise at the end of each song on which
I sang lead. That felt good.
For me, personally, this was a milestone performance: though I have been
playing this music now for over ten years, this was the first truly country
and western gig I’d ever been on. Shows I had been playing with my own
band for the past seven years either were for rock crowds or were in diverse
rooms where some patrons were serious country and western fans, but most
people were socializing to music that happened to be country and western.
And though most of the songs we played that night originated in Nashville
or Bakersfield, what we were doing at the Thompson Community Center
did not feel attached to those places at all. The heady commercial coun-
try music world of Nashville—where I had spent considerable time in the
past knocking on doors, making commercial recordings, playing at record
label showcases, meeting with music industry professionals, lawyers, and
songwriters—felt very far away from Union, Maine. Here at the Thompson
Center, people in matching cowboy clothes were dancing, and we had to
play mostly slow or midtempo songs for them. This was a challenge for
me, as I like to push the beat, and—instinctively as someone who grew up
playing rock music first—I think of “dance” songs as fast songs. This is not
the case when you are playing traditional country and western for a room
full of Mainers who grew up two-stepping, polkaing, and square dancing
to country and western music.
The stage sound was not good—the drummer had trouble hearing the
band and would occasionally drop the beat when the phrasing fell behind
or ahead of the established rhythm. This is part of the country singer’s job—

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 fieldnotes xv

to keep a steady rhythm on guitar while falling around the beat with the
vocals. This is particularly true at a dance in Maine for a room full of Dick
Curless, Lefty Frizzell, and Merle Haggard fans. So a muddy stage sound
that causes a drummer to be thrown off by this kind of vocal technique is
a bit of a liability. But no one seemed to mind, and I found myself watch-
ing the feet of the dancers in order to keep time when the drummer’s beat
was unclear. This visual metronome was like nothing I’d ever experienced
before as a musician.
At one point the drummer teetered on reversing the beat of the song,
and so she dropped out entirely for about two measures. During this gap,
the swooshing of the dancers’ feet as they grazed the dance floor was fully
audible: no conversation in the room could be heard, just the swooshing of
the dancers’ feet in time to the music like a set of brushes on a snare drum.
The sound filled the gymnasium in balance with the reverberating music,
and the engagement of the band with the audience—and the audience with
the band—was fully palpable and audible if just for a moment before the
drums kicked back in. The nature of the relationship between the country
and western group and its audience appeared revealed in that moment—
where the musicians and the audience serve as alternating engines that drive
the country and western event.
I wound up playing three sets with the band. The material covered songs
by Gene Autry, George Jones, Buck Owens, Hank Williams, Ray Price, Merle
Haggard, Willie Nelson, and other “traditional country” songs. There were
no songs from the Maine country and western pioneer repertoire (meaning,
no songs written by Mainers), though we played a number of traditional
instrumentals, and I sang Doc Williams’s “Roses Are Blooming,” to the sur-
prise of the band members and the audience. During a set break, the other
players in the band each told me stories about playing with Dick Curless
at some point in the past.
We played a couple of tunes that I just never would have ever played
otherwise, including “Tiny Bubbles” (Don Ho), “Chattahoochie” (Alan
Jackson), and “Margaritaville” (Jimmy Buffett). The audience wanted to
hear them, so we played them. I had gone nearly twenty years playing gigs
while successfully avoiding ever playing a Jimmy Buffett tune. No longer.
After the third set, Dick Philbrook kicked me out: he knew I’d hoped to
find a motel room up by Belfast, and he told me that it’d be too late by the
time they finished the fourth set. So I packed up to leave. Dick told me that
anytime I was back in the area, I was welcome to sit in with the band. He
was very enthusiastic about this. Evelyn handed me her cell phone, too, as
Wade Dow was on the other end of it. Wade, too, felt bad that we’d crossed

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 xvi prologue

wires, and he invited me to come by on Sunday to his house to meet up

for an interview. We decided on 3:00. Dick pulled me aside and suggested
I stay at a motel that’s just on the other side of the bridge in Belfast. “It’s
got a good rate, and it’s where I used to take my girlfriends back in high
school.” I made a mental note not to stay there—not because I didn’t trust
Dick, but because I took him at his word and didn’t want to get a room
next to a couple of high school kids. With that, the band thanked me for my
help, the crowd gave me a hearty round of applause, and I was on the road
down Route 17 toward the coast, having finally played a real country and
western gig. It was not the first time I had benefited from the inclusiveness
so pervasive among audiences and musicians at New England country and
western events, but it was certainly the most personally rewarding.

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 yankee twang

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Murphy_text.indd 18 6/11/14 8:39 AM
 Introduction
reintroducing new england
to the country music world

New England country and western music has been buried under a moun-
tain of corporate propaganda that wants you to believe that country music
is an exclusively southern cultural export. This process began in the late
1950s, when corporate music industrialists in Nashville orchestrated a union
between record companies, song publishers, and radio DJs that effectively
swept the nation’s copious and colorful regional subsets of country and west-
ern music off the airwaves and truncated the music’s commercial moniker
to “country music” (without the “western”). In this new Nashville-based
and corporate-controlled order, country music became virtually anything
sung with a southern accent. And as country and western music makers
outside the South had ever-decreasing access to broadcast mediums from
the late 1950s onward, the ensuing decades of southern-“branded” country
music have served to erase much of the living memory of the rich country
and western legacies of those regions whose misfortune places them outside
of the vaunted southern United States. The subsequent popularity of the
new corporate country music among working people in the North has led
industrialists, scholars, and cultural purists to alternately celebrate and la-
ment this illusory triumph of southern culture in the North.
In New England, many have come to misunderstand the music’s popular-
ity as a new phenomenon, unaware that New England country and west-
ern music has a long and storied history, convinced instead by Nashville’s
chokehold on broadcast media that country music is and always has been
a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, southern cultural export. Up until the
formation of the Country Music DJ Association (later to become the Coun-
try Music Association) in 1958, the country and western music heard on
the airwaves in New England was mostly made by New Englanders (and
not just any New Englanders, but predominantly those of an ethnic and
religious heritage different from that of their southern counterparts). That

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Other documents randomly have
different content
VII

The Story of John Wanamaker

I N a plain two-story dwelling, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the

future merchant prince was born, July 11, 1837. His parents were
Americans in humble station; his mother being of that sturdy
Pennsylvania Dutch stock which has no parallel except the Scotch for
ruggedness. His father, a hardworking man, owned a brickyard in the
close vicinity of the family residence. Little John earned his first
money, seven big copper cents, by assisting his father. He was too
small to do much, but turned the bricks every morning as they lay
drying in the summer sun. As he grew older and stronger, the boy
was given harder tasks around the brickyard.
He went to school a little, not much, and he assisted his mother in
the house a great deal. His father died when John was fourteen, and
this changed the whole course of his life. He abandoned the
brickyard and secured a place in a bookstore owned by Barclay
Lippincott, on Market Street, Philadelphia, at a salary of one dollar
and twenty-five cents a week.
 It was a four-mile walk from his home to his place of business.
Cheerfully he trudged this distance morning and night; purchasing
an apple or a roll each noon for luncheon, and giving his mother all
the money that he saved. He used to deny himself every comfort,
and the only other money that he ever spent was on books for his
mother. This seems to have been the boy’s chief source of pleasure
at that period. Even to-day, he says of his mother: “Her smile was a
bit of heaven, and it never faded out of her face till her dying day.”
Mrs. Wanamaker lived to see her son famous and wealthy.
 HIS CAPITAL AT FOURTEEN

John Wanamaker, the boy, had no single thing in all his

surroundings to give him an advantage over any one of hundreds of
other boys in the city of Philadelphia. Indeed, there were hundreds
and hundreds of other boys of his own age for whom anyone would
have felt safe in prophesying a more notable career. His capital was
not in money. Very few boys in all that great city had less money
than John Wanamaker, and comparatively few families of average
position but were better off in the way of worldly goods. John
Wanamaker’s capital, that stood him in such good stead in after life,
comprised good health, good habits, a clean mind, thrift in money
matters, and tireless devotion to whatever he thought to be duty.
People who were well acquainted with John Wanamaker when he
was a book publisher’s boy, say that he was exceptionally promising
as a boy; that he was studious as well as attentive to business. He
did not take kindly to rough play, or do much playing of any kind. He
was earnest in his work, unusually earnest for a boy. And he was
saving of his money.
When, a little later, he went to a Market street clothing house and
asked for a place, he had no difficulty in getting it, nor had he any
trouble in holding it, and here he could earn twenty-five cents a
week more wages.
 TOWER HALL CLOTHING STORE

Men who worked with him in the Tower Hall Clothing Store say
that he was always bright, willing, accommodating, and very seldom
out of temper. His effort was to be first at the store in the morning,
and he was very likely to be one of the last, if not the last, at the
store in the evening. If there was an errand, he was always prompt
and glad to do it. And so the store people liked him, and the
proprietor liked him, and, when he began to sell clothing, the
customers liked him. He was considerate of their interests. He did
not try to force undesirable goods upon them. He treated them so
that when they came again they would be apt to ask, “Where is
John?”
 HIS AMBITION AND POWER AS AN ORGANIZER AT SIXTEEN

Colonel Bennett, the proprietor of Tower Hall, said of him at this

time:—
“John was certainly the most ambitious boy I ever saw. I used to
take him to lunch with me, and he used to tell me how he was going
to be a great merchant.
“He was very much interested in the temperance cause; and had
not been with me long before he persuaded most of the employees
in the store to join the temperance society to which he belonged. He
was always organizing something. He seemed to be a natural-born
organizer. This faculty is largely accountable for his great success in
after life.”
 THE Y. M. C. A.

Young Wanamaker’s religious principles were always at the

forefront in whatever he did. His interest in Sunday School work, and
his skill as an organizer became well known. And so earnestly did he
engage in the work of the Young Men’s Christian Association, that he
was appointed the first salaried secretary of the Philadelphia branch,
at one thousand dollars a year. Never since has a secretary enrolled
so many members in the same space of time. He passed seven
years in this arduous work.
 OAK HALL

He saved his money; and, at twenty-four, formed a partnership

with his brother-in-law Nathan Brown, and opened Oak Hall Clothing
store, in April, 1861. Their united capital was only $3,500; yet
Wanamaker’s capital of popular good-will was very great. He was
already a great power in the city. I can never forget the impression
made upon my mind, after he had been in business but a few
months, when I visited his Bethany Sunday School, established in
one of the most unpromising sections of the city, which had become
already a factor for good, with one of the largest enrollments in the
world. And he was foremost in every form of philanthropic work.
It was because of his great capacity to do business that
Wanamaker had been able to “boom” the Young Men’s Christian
Association work. He knew how to do it. And he could “boom” a
Sunday School, or anything else that he took hold of. He had
 A HEAD BUILT FOR BUSINESS,

whatever the business might be. And as for Oak Hall, he knew just
what to do with it.
The first thing he did was to multiply his working capital by getting
the best help obtainable for running the store.
At the very outset, John Wanamaker did what almost any other
business man would have stood aghast at. He chose the best man
he knew as a salesman in the clothing business in Philadelphia,—the
man of the most winning personality who could attract trade,—and
agreed to pay him $1,350 for a year,—one-third of the entire capital
of the new concern.
It has been a prime principle with this merchant prince not only to
deal fairly with his employees, but to make it an object for them to
earn money for him and to stand by him. Capacity has been the first
demand. He engaged the very best men to be had. There are to-day
dozens of men in his employ who receive larger salaries than are
paid to cabinet ministers. All the employees of the Thirteenth Street
store, which he occupied in 1877, participate in a yearly division of
profits. Their share at the end of the first year amounted to
$109,439.68.
 HIS RELATION TO CUSTOMERS

A considerable portion of the trade of the new store came from

people in the country districts. Mr. Wanamaker had a way of getting
close to them and gaining their good will. He understood human
nature. He put his customer at ease. He showed interest in the
things that interested the farmer. An old employee of the firm says:
“John used to put a lot of chestnuts in his pocket along in the fall
and winter, and, when he had one of these countrymen in tow, he’d
slip a few of the nuts into the visitor’s hand and both would go
munching about the store.”
Wanamaker was the first to introduce the “one-price system” into
the clothing trade. It was the universal rule in those days, in the
clothing trade, not to mark the prices plainly on the goods that were
for sale. Within rather liberal bounds, the salesman got what he
could from the customer. Mr. Wanamaker, after a time, instituted at
Oak Hall the plan of “but one price and that plainly marked.” In
doing this he followed the cue of Stewart, who was the first
merchant in the country to introduce it into the dry-goods business.
The great Wanamaker store of 1877 went much further:—
He announced that those who bought goods of him were to be
satisfied with what they bought, or have their money back.
To the old mercantile houses of the city, this seemed like
committing business suicide.
It was, also, unheard-of that special effort should be made to add
to the comfort of visitors; to make them welcome whether they
cared to buy or not; to induce them to look upon the store as a
meeting-place, a rendezvous, a resting-place,—a sort of city home,
almost.
 THE MERCHANT’S ORGANIZING FACULTY

was so great that General Grant once remarked to George W. Childs

that Wanamaker would have been a great general if his lot had been
that of army service.
Wanamaker used to buy goods of Stewart, and the New York
merchant remarked to a friend: “If young Wanamaker lives, he will
be a greater merchant than I ever was.”
Sometime in recent years, since Wanamaker bought the Stewart
store, he said to Frank G. Carpenter:—
“A. T. Stewart was a genius. I have been surprised again and
again as I have gone through the Broadway and Tenth Street
building, to find what a knowledge he had of the needs of a
mercantile establishment. Mr. Stewart put up a building which is to-
day, I believe, better arranged than any of the modern structures.
He seemed to know just what was needed.
“I met him often when I was a young man. I have reason to think
that he took a liking to me. One day, I remember, I was in his
woolen department buying some stuffs for my store here, when he
came up to me and asked if I would be in the store for fifteen
minutes longer. I replied that I would. At the end of fifteen minutes
he returned and handed me a slip of paper, saying:—
“‘Young man, I understand that you have a mission school in
Philadelphia; use that for it.’
“Before I could reply he had left. I looked down at the slip of
paper. It was a check for one thousand dollars.”
Wanamaker early showed himself the peer of the greatest
merchants. He created the combination or department store. He
lifted the retail clothing business to a higher plane than it had ever
before reached. In ten years from the time he began to do business
for himself, he had absorbed the space of forty-five other tenants
and become the leading merchant of his native city. Four years later,
he had purchased, for $450,000, the freight depot of the
Pennsylvania Railroad, covering the entire square where his present
great store is located. The firm name became simply John
Wanamaker. His lieutenants and business partners therein are his
son Thomas B. Wanamaker, and Robert C. Ogden. Their two
Philadelphia establishments alone do a business of between
$30,000,000 and $40,000,000 annually. Mr. Wanamaker’s private
fortune is one of the most substantial in America.
 ATTENTION TO DETAILS

Yet in all these years he has been early and late at the store, as
he was when a boy. He has always seen to it that customers have
prompt and careful attention. He early made the rule that if a sale
was missed, a written reason must be rendered by the salesman.
There was no hap-hazard business in that store,—nothing of the
happy-go-lucky style. Each man must be alert, wide-awake,
attentive, or there was no place for him at Oak Hall.
 THE MOST RIGID ECONOMY

has been always a part of the system. It is told of him that, in the
earlier days of Oak Hall, he used to gather up the short pieces of
string that came in on parcels, make them into a bunch, and see
that they were used when bundles were to be tied. He also had a
habit of smoothing out old newspapers, and seeing that they were
used as wrappers for such things as did not require a better grade of
paper.
The story has been often related of the first day’s business at the
original store in ’61, when Wanamaker delivered the sales by
wheeling a push-cart.
 ADVERTISING

The first day’s business made a cash profit of thirty-eight dollars;

and the whole sum was invested in one advertisement in the next
day’s “Inquirer.”
His advertising methods were unique; he paid for the best talent
he could get in this line.
Philadelphia woke one morning to find “W. & B.” in the form of six-
inch square posters stuck up all over the town. There was not
another letter, no hint, just “W. & B.” Such things are common
enough now, but then the whole city was soon talking and
wondering what this sign meant. After a few days, a second poster
modestly stated that Wanamaker & Brown had begun to sell clothing
at Oak Hall. Before long there were great signs, each 100 feet in
length, painted on special fences built in a dozen places about the
city, particularly near the railroad stations. These told of the new
firm and were the first of a class that is now seen all over the
country. Afterwards
 BALLOONS

more than twenty feet high were sent up, and a suit of clothes was
given to each person who brought one of them back. Whole counties
were stirred up by the balloons. It was grand advertising, imitated
since by all sorts of people. When the balloon idea struck the Oak
Hall management it was quickly found that the only way to get these
air-ships was to make them, and so, on the roof of the store, the
cotton cloth was cut and oiled and put together. Being well built, and
tied very tightly at the neck, they made long flights and some of
them were used over and over again. In one instance, a balloon
remained for more than six months in a cranberry swamp, and when
the great bag was discovered, slowly swaying in the breeze, among
the bushes, the frightened Jerseymen thought they had come upon
an elephant, or, maybe, a survivor of the mastodons. This made
more advertising of the very best kind for the clothing store,—the
kind that excites interested, complimentary talk.
 SEIZING OPPORTUNITIES

Genius consists in taking advantage of opportunities quite as

much as in making them. Here was a young man doing things in an
advertising way regardless of the custom of the business world, and
with a wonderful knowledge of human nature. He took
commonsense advantage of opportunities that were open to
everybody.
Soon after the balloon experience, tally-ho coaching began to be a
Philadelphia fad of the very exclusives. Immediately afterwards a
crack coach was secured, and six large and spirited horses were
used instead of four, and Oak Hall employees, dressed in the style of
the most ultra coaching set, traversed the country in every direction,
scattering advertising matter to the music of the horn. Sometimes
they would be a week on a trip. No wonder Oak Hall flourished. It
was kept in the very front of the procession all the time.
A little later, in the yachting season, the whole town was attracted
and amused by processions and scatterings of men, each wearing a
wire body frame that supported a thin staff from which waved a
wooden burgee, or pointed flag reminding them of Oak Hall. Nearly
two hundred of these prototypes of the “Sandwich man” were often
out at one time.
But it was not only in the quick catching of a novel advertising
thought that the new house was making history; in newspaper
advertising, it was even further in advance. The statements of store
news were crisp and unhackneyed, and the first artistic illustrations
ever put into advertisements were used there. So high was the
grade of this picture-work that art schools regularly clipped the
illustrations as models; and the world-famous Shakespearian scholar,
Dr. Horace Howard Furness, treasured the original sketches of “The
Seven Ages” as among the most interesting in his unique collection.
 PUSH AND PERSISTENCE

“The chief reason,” said Mr. Wanamaker upon one occasion, “that
everybody is not successful is the fact that they have not enough
persistency. I always advise young men who write me on the subject
to do one thing well, throwing all their energies into it.”
To his employees he once said:—“We are very foolish people if we
shut our ears and eyes to what other people are doing. I often pick
up things from strangers. As you go along, pick up suggestions here
and there, jot them down and send them along. Even writing them
down helps to concentrate your mind on that part of the work. You
need not be afraid of overstepping the mark. The more we push
each other, the better.”
 “TO WHAT, MR. WANAMAKER, DO YOU ATTRIBUTE YOUR GREAT SUCCESS?”

In reply to this question when asked, he replied:—“To thinking,

toiling, trying, and trusting in God.”
A serene confidence in a guiding power has always been one of
the Wanamaker characteristics. He is always calm. Under the
greatest stress he never loses his head.
In one physical particular, Mr. Wanamaker is very remarkable. He
can work continually for a long time without sleep and without
evidence of strain, and make up for it by a good rest afterwards.
When upon one occasion he was asked to name the essentials of
success, he replied, curtly:—“I might write a volume trying to tell
you how to succeed. One way is to not be above taking a hint from
a master. I don’t care to tell why I succeeded; because I object to
talking about myself,—it isn’t modest.”
A feature of his make-up that has contributed largely to his
success is his ability to concentrate his thoughts. No matter how
trivial the subject brought before him, he takes it up with the
appearance of one who has nothing else on his mind.
 HIS VIEWS ON BUSINESS

When asked whether the small tradesmen has any “show” to-day
against the great department stores, he said:—
“All of the great stores were small at one time. Small stores will
keep on developing into big ones. You wouldn’t expect a man to put
an iron band about his business in order to prevent expansion,
would you? There are, according to statistics, a greater number of
prosperous small stores in the city than ever before. What better
proof do you want?
“The department store is a natural product, evolved from
conditions that exist as a result of fixed trade laws. Executive
capacity, combined with command of capital, finds opportunity in
these conditions, which are harmonious with the irresistible
determination of the producer to meet the consumer directly, and of
merchandise to find distribution along the lines of least resistance.
Reduced prices stimulate consumption, and increase employment;
and it is sound opinion that the increased employment created by
the department stores goes to women without curtailing that of
men. In general it may be stated that large retail stores have
shortened the hours of labor; and by systematic discipline have
made it lighter. The small store is harder upon the sales-person and
clerk. The effects upon the character and capacity of the employees
are good. A well ordered, modern retail store is the means of
education in spelling, writing, English language, system and method.
Thus it becomes to the ambitious and serious employees, in a small
way, a university, in which character is broadened by intelligent
instruction practically applied.”
When asked if a man with means but no experience would be safe
in embarking in a mercantile business, he replied quickly:—
“A man can’t drive a horse who has never seen one. No; a man
must have training, must know how to buy and sell; only experience
teaches that.”
 I have heard people marvel at the unbroken upward course of Mr.
Wanamaker’s career, and lament that they so often make mistakes.
But hear him:—
“Who does not make mistakes? Why, if I were to think only of the
mistakes I have made, I should be miserable indeed.”
I have heard it said a hundred times that Mr. Wanamaker started
when success was easy. Here is what he says himself about it:—
“I think I could succeed as well now as in the past. It seems to me
that the conditions of to-day are even more favorable to success
than when I was a boy. There are better facilities for doing business,
and more business to be done. Information in the shape of books
and newspapers is now in the reach of all, and the young man has
two opportunities where he formerly had one.
“We are much more afraid of combinations of capital than we
have any reason for being. Competition regulates everything of that
kind. No organization can make immense profits for any length of
time without its field soon swarming with competitors. It requires
brain and muscle to manage any kind of business, and the same
elements which have produced business success in the past will
produce it now, and will always produce it.”
 PUBLIC SERVICE

With the exception of his term of service as postmaster-general of

the United States in President Harrison’s cabinet—a service which
was marked by great executive ability and the institution of many
reforms,—Mr. Wanamaker has devoted his attention almost entirely
to his business and his church work.
Yet as a citizen he has always taken a most positive course in
opposition to the evils that threaten society. He has been forever
prompted by his religious convictions to pursue vice either in the
“dive,” or in municipal, state or national life. He hates a barroom, but
he hates a treasury looter far more fiercely. His idea of Christian duty
was evidently derived from the scene wherein the Master took a
scourge and drove the corrupt traders and office-holders out of the
temple. It is vigorous, it is militant; but it makes enemies.
Consequently, Mr. Wanamaker is not without persistent maligners;
getting himself well hated by the worst men in the community.
 INVEST IN YOURSELF

Mr. Wanamaker’s views of what life is for are well expressed in the
following excerpt from one of his addresses to young men.
In the course of his address, he related that he was once called
upon to invest in an expedition to recover Spanish mahogany and
doubloons from the Spanish Main, which, for half a century, had lain
under the rolling waves in sunken frigates. “But, young men,” he
continued, “I know of better expeditions than this right at home,
deep down under the sea of neglect and ignorance and
discouragement. Near your own feet lie treasures untold, and you
can have them all for your own by earnest watch and faithful study
and proper care.
“Let us not be content to mine the most coal, make the largest
locomotives and weave the largest quantities of carpets; but, amid
the sounds of the pick, the blows of the hammer, the rattle of the
looms, and the roar of the machinery, take care that the immortal
mechanism of God’s own hand,—the mind,—is still full-trained for
the highest and noblest service.
“This is the most enduring kind of property to acquire, a property
of soul which no disaster can wreck or ruin. Whatever may be the
changes that shall sweep over our fair land, no power can ever take
away from you your investments in knowledge.”
 AT HOME

Like all other magnetic and forceful men, Mr. Wanamaker is

striking in appearance, strong rather than handsome. He has a full,
round head, a broad forehead, a strong nose, heavy-lidded eyes that
flash with energy, heavy jaws that denote strength of will, and
tightly closed lips that just droop at the corners, giving an ever-
present touch of sedateness. His face is as smooth as a boy’s and as
mobile as an actor’s; and, when lighted up in discussion, it beams
with expression. He wears a hat that is only six and seven-eighths in
size, but is almost completely circular in form. He is almost six feet
tall and finely built, and all his motions have in them the springiness
of health. Nobody ever saw him dressed in any other color than
black, with a black necktie under a “turn-down” collar. But he always
looks as trim as if he were just out of the hands of both tailor and
barber.
It is his delight to pass much time at his country seat in
Jenkintown. He is fond of the field and the river, the trees and
flowers, and all the growths with which God has beautified the
earth. His house is a home-like structure, with wide piazzas,
standing upon the crest of a hill in the midst of a noble lawn. A big
rosery and orchid house stand near by. The before-breakfast ramble
of the proprietor is finished in the flower garden, and every guest is
laden with floral trophies.
Mr. Wanamaker was married, while he was the Secretary of the Y.
M. C. A., to one whom he met at a church service, and who has
been in full sympathy with his religious activities. He has been for
forty years superintendent of the Bethany Sunday School in
Philadelphia. He began with two teachers and twenty-seven pupils;
and at the recent anniversary reported a school of 4,500, a church
with 3,700 members, 500 having been added during the past year,
several branches, and scores of department organizations.
 John Wanamaker says to-day that his business success is due to
his religious training. He is first of all a Christian.
The lesson of such a life should be precious to every young man.
It teaches the value of untiring effort, of economy, of common sense
applied to common business. I know of no career in this country that
offers more encouragement to young people. It shows what
persistency can do; it shows what intelligent, well-directed, tireless
effort can do; and it proves that a man may devote himself to
helping others, to the Sunday School, to the Church, to broad
philanthropy, and still be wonderfully successful in a business way.
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