The Home Harmonious

With a Chart Showing How Easy it is for Any Family to Have One

GEORGE S. CHAPPELL

ADOLPH ODD • TUESDAYS

JN&A

ODD 'TUESDAYS

HANNAH

ALL THURSDAYS

LOUISE

MON PAYS

E.UGENE

EVENINGS

WHEN I hear, as I so frequently do, the plaints of husbands and wives relative to a certain out-of-jointness in their domestic arrangements, I am tempted, nay, I have decided that it is my duty, to put self-consciousness in the background, and to tell the readers of Vanity Fair frankly and honestly the story of my family struggle and how I won to victory through the magic guidance of one great all-important element — namely, Organization, or System, or Efficiency,—call it what you will. Indeed, if I may be of service to others who have found their Sinfonia Domestica out-of-tune, why should I hesitate to hold out a hand to them?

Picture us then, a fairly typical family: husband, wife, four children, and a modest retinue of inefficient assistants, living on our all-the-year-round estate ("Deepdene") among the Westchester hills and endeavoring to readjust ourselves to the somewhat easier living conditions of the last six months with a lack of success which has filled me with apprehension and dismay.

"What is the trouble?" I asked myself, and Echo answered, "trouble," which was true but quite unsatisfactory. Yes, indeed, trouble there was. Frankly, my home was rapidly becoming a place from which I fled at every opportunity.

I WONDER if many husbands have not suffered from my symptoms. Nothing seemed to be a success. Dinners, from family to formal, were equally a bore. The children were wild and ill-disciplined, the servants impertinent, my friends—according to a well-recognized authority—beneath the notice of a civilized human-being; my wife's friends—but I will go no further.

You see the picture.

It was part of the aftermath of war. Freed and let-down from the spiritual exaltation of war-work we had sunk into a morass of recrimination and gloom from which it seemed I should never extricate myself. And then, at the darkest hour, the hour just before dawn, Fate took a hand and I met Mr. G. Udney Block, the Diagrammatic Organizer, the great efficiency expert, and life again became for me a thing of hope and beauty.

Yes, Reader, if this story seems to begin tragically, be assured that it has a happy ending, for, with the coming of G. Udney Block and his little charts into my life things began to happen with amazing rapidity.

I shall never forget the morning we met. We happened to have adjoining chairs in the Mt. Kisco club-car, and he had spoken to me twice without receiving any answer from me. We were passing Woodlawn Cemetery at the time and I suppose it was the look of longing in my eyes as I gazed out at peaceful slopes dotted with granite obelisks and small bankbuildings and weeping willows that brought out all there was of best in G. Udney Block. At any rate, he laid his hand—-a rather cold one,—on my wrist and said quietly:

"Friend, you are in trouble. You need Organization."

Something in the calm certainty with which this strange man pronounced the word "organization" with a capital O, was the very key to my heart. His words, to put it tritely, were the straw that broke the Johnstown dam and I flooded to my confession with such volubility that, before we parted at the Grand Central Station, Block had arranged to meet me at the gate of the 5:06, to become, forthwith, Executive Manager and Efficiency Organizer of my household.

Our conversation had ended quite dramatically. I had done most of the talking, Block shoe-horning in a word occasionally, when he suddenly interrupted me with the firm decision of a Surgeon deciding on a $500 operation.

"A perfectly clear case," he said. "What you need most of all is an Organization Chart."

"Say no more," I screamed. "You are engaged!"

FOR years I had been fascinated by the idea that some day, somehow, I might belong to some sort of Organization that would have a Chart, and now I was to have one—right in my own home.

A Chart! Think of it!

In a flash I saw, in retrospect, the first Organization Chart I had ever seen. It was years ago and was issued by the Standard Oil Company. It represented the Rockefeller, Rogers and Harkness families as a bunch' of balloons tied by slender threads to rectangles with imposing titles such as "Output in barrels for 1912," or "Leakage loss per freight mile."

Since that time every sort of chart has intrigued me even when the facts they conveyed are not particularly vital. "The relative number of colored people in New York society," or "The proportion of tug-boat captains' time lost between hauls," are matters that do not affect me seriously; but the charts and diagrams which prove these facts can make me late for dinner any day.

And now G. Udney Block, Efficiency Expert and Scientific Business Manager, actually proposed that I should have a chart and be a balloon myself,—perhaps the biggest balloon of all, like John B. Somehow the very thought filled me with joy and hope. I knew it would work. It certainly had worked with the Standard Oil.

It took two hours of concentrated oratory—a sort of Liebig's Extract of Demosthenes,—to convince the partner of my joys (and sorrows) "that the experiment was worth trying!—but at last she capitulated and Block was assigned a guest-room.

Let me speak at once of the results, and replace encomiums by a few observations on the chart itself (Fig. 1), pausing only to say that I have at present the happiest home and the most charming family in Westchester County. But look at the chart. As you will see, Block's unerring finger immediately located our troubles.

TO be more explicit, the members of my immediate family had been acting more or less as free agents independently of the Domestic Soviet. It had not occurred to us that this powerful body, in its turn, might be acting independently of us. Consequently when the car failed to meet the 5:06, leaving me raging in the station, while, at the same moment, my wife was saying for the thousandth time on the piazza of the Pruyn-Cochrane's, "I imagine Edouard must have had a puncture," it never occurred to either o'f us that Edouard had made private and purely personal arrangements to take Louise, the nurse, at that particular hour, to buy a bottle of perfume at the Five and Ten Cent S ore in White Plains. No, indeed! —we simply blamed each other. Small wonder, then, that dinner that evening was a gloomy performance.

But G. Udney Block, how quickly you changed all that with the aid of the Chart, which now hangs in the hall at "Deepdene." A most casual glance at it will show how the Scientist at once recognized the true co-relation . and inter-structure of the family with its seat of real government at the Servants' Soviet, its lines of contributory authority from the Service Balloons, Adolph, Inga and the others,—with the dependent and entirely distinct lines of action leading to the Family Balloons, and so on.

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It seems hardly necessary to point out the allotment of certain days of the week upon which the person designated is, so to speak, "Officer of the Day," on which days the person is in supreme command of all the household movements, supply and motor-transport. One point—which might escape casual scrutiny—shows that G. Udney Block, Scientist,—possesses a heart as well as a brain. Almost instantly recognizing the caloric entente between Adolph, my man, and Inga, the most recent of our maids (she is an almost perfect Zorn type) Block, I say, recognizing all this,—carefully synchronized their hours of leave sc that I now arrange to do my own valeting on the immediately succeeding morning thereby avoiding the wear-and-tear on nerves and temper which were so trying under the old hit-or-miss system.

IT is this very thing—the knowledge of what is going to happen to you, or is happening to you—which, as Udney pointed out, is the secret of the great happiness to be attained by means of Scientific Organization. Conversely, to revert to the old illustration—that of the missing motor which leaves you stranded in the station—it is the unexpectedness, the baffling mystery, the ignorance of where the cursed thing is —which causes you to gnaw off a fiftycent manicure in silent rage, and plan a domestic pogrom as soon as you reach the home foyer.

Just to prove all this, Mr. Block diagrammatized (which is a pretty word) a number of bits of inside-work which had been going on right under my own roof. Most of these diagrams were the result of plotting a curve, based on data derived from the most painstaking observations. For instance, I had noticed that almost immediately after Adolph came into the household an alarming supply of cigars was found necessary to keep up with the demand. Moreover, I had once overheard Adolph singing in his gay, gallic way, an old refrain to the words, "Gaily the humidor smokes his cigar-o!" which led me to suspect him. Happening to mention this to Block, he at once evolved the interesting diagram, Fig. 2, which shows the decreasing curve of cigar-loss effected by the simple process of mixing with my Corona-Coronas a gradually increasing proportion of perfectos which resemble my favorite brand only in that they are manufactured in Corona, .Long Island. If you have ever seen Corona, L. I., you will appreciate why Adolph's curve bent southward.

Again, more for his own and for my amusement than for any other reason, Block plotted the curve of Cocktail Consumption resulting from the fact that "Deepdene" is almost exactly midway between the Golf Club and the bathing-beach. You will note (Fig. 3) that this curve went completely off the paper about the middle of June and, I am sure, had Block been able to continue his observations up to July first, that the result would have been an almost perfect circle.

I said "had he been able to continue his investigations." Alas, there is a fly in every ointment—and there was a fly in Mr. Block's. Yes, I felt it my duty to terminate my contract with him when Adolph reported to me that he had discovered "zat professeur" engaged in deep conversation with golden-haired Inga in the summer house. Udney said that he had simply been plotting her curves, but, as he had no diagrams to prove it, it seemed best to let him go.

So, by an early morning train, G. Udney Block left us, mourned by all the household—except Adolph. But I shall never forget him. He has left, as a precious legacy, his 6harts and his data, his curves and comparisons, his bead-maps and memoranda, thanks to which "Deepdene" is moving smoothly, sweetly and harmoniously on its way.

We often think of the man who thus brought system into our lives, and wonder what he is doing now. Some good, no doubt.

The system has. become slightly disarranged since his departure to be sure. Only yesterday I found my son-andheir trying to operate one of the curves on the victrola—but we pin our faith, in the main, to the chart,—which, like that used by mariners, has brought us through stress and storm to the Harbor of Happy Ending,—where "they lived happily ever after."