The Choice of a Career

An Article, "Just for Young Fellows", by One Who Used to Be One

GEORGE S. CHAPPELL

THE next few weeks will be marked by the emergence into the active, adult world, of thousands of fresh-laid citizens. Numerous colleges will pour forth their graduates, clear-eyed, enthusiastic, self-confident young men with nothing sheepish about them but their sheepskins. Each graduating class will earnestly proclaim that '25 is the best ever for the same reasons that have made every class the best since Ezra Scadgett first laid the corner stone of old Rumdum Hall.

But back of all this self-confidence, in the individual hearts of those who profess it, there will be doubt. Many of these young men are at this very moment harried by anxiety as to how the fruits of their expensive education can be used to the best advantage. "What shall I do?" the individual asks himself. "In what walk of life will my assets: a coonskin coat, a pair of wide flannel trousers, a saxophone and a diploma, be accepted at their real value?"

IT IS to help this young man that this article is penned. Two and a half decades of observation convince me that now is the time he most needs advice. For it is now that he is called upon to make the most vital decision of his life, the choice of a career.

We are all familiar with the criticisms leveled at the college graduate. One cynic has said that he put his boy through college because he wanted to be fair. He wanted his boy to start life with the same handicap as other boys. Such eminent educators as Thomas Edison and his jolly old pal, Henry Ford, have said their say on the subject. They rate diplomas low. They point to the Coasts of Folly, strewn with expensive wrecks and compute through their statisticians the disparity between white collar jobs and white collars. But their reasoning is out of date. White collars have gone out. The Prince changed all that.

There is a residuum of truth, however, in these criticisms of which we should take notice. The collegian is too often an ornamental failure or, if a success, too often unhappy, for the evident reason that he is misplaced. Too many sons follow in their fathers' footsteps. They go to work for their dads. This is dangerous and should be discouraged. Parents are too prejudiced to be trustworthy. Moreover, the parental relation hampers the ambitious son. Though business may go well, the young man is constantly burdened by the thought that, should he make a mistake in a deal, his senior partner will close the door to the inner office, take the hairbrush from the private lavatory and show him, in the old, parental way, that business must be learned from the bottom, up. Bad, very bad, for the morale of the young man.

This is where I come in. My relation to those I would help is unbiassed. I speak as a friend minus the minatory hairbrush.

Then there are a large number of graduates who have no idea what they wish to do. They take the first job that is offered. They cither remain square pegs in round holes or waste precious years finding where they fit. This, too, is bad and here, again I feel that I can be of service.

So much for the situation. Now for a few practical suggestions, which, I should point out, are not mere theory. Many of them I have already put in practice. My work on a college club committee whose function is to find jobs for the jobless has enabled me to place a number of young men in positions where they have found the two great desiderata of life, mental happiness and material success, or sufficient promise of it to warrant their carrying on. The central point of my system is to convince my boys, as I love to call them, that they must begin at the bottom and work up rather than begin at the top and settle down. The selfmade man is America's idol. No other success compares with his.

With this basic idea in mind I started my unofficial employment bureau for boys. One of the first cases upon which I tried out my system was that of a youth whom we may really call a "type". He was the super-athlete. Scraping through college by the skin of his academic teeth he had graduated, magna cum laude, in baseball and football. His brain, active and alert on diamond and gridiron, was torpid when in contact with the printed page. Yet this charming numskull proposed to go into the bond business.

THERE is a fatal lure in this activity. A job is always waiting. No experience is necessary. Any company is glad to employ, on a commission basis, a bright faced boy who will try to sell Memphis Sewage Disposal Fives, but for men like the lad I mention the case is hopeless. His ultimate progress, I knew, would depend on his ability to talk fluently of recondite matters such as yield, maturity and exemption. He must know the population of Memphis, the taxable value of its real estate and the average income tax paid by its citizens. In a word, he must be able to explain to a prospective customer just what is back of this sewage business. I knew well that my young friend would simply say, "Have a heart. Memphis needs a sewer. Will you help?" and there his case would rest.

"No, Son," I said, "put this bond business out of your head. Capitalize your strong points, not your weak ones. What you need is an active, athletic job where your strength and quickness will count." I placed him as a messenger boy in one of the big companies.

"Andrew Carnegie started as a messenger boy," I reminded him, "and see what he did. America loves its magnate-messenger-boys; and there is this to be said for messenger boys in general, there is no telling where they will end up. They may go far. One was once sent from Chicago to London."

My applicant was captivated. And he got the job.

I follow up my experiments. I have watched this young man's work and it is all to the good. A line from the president of the company says, "Rogers' work to date is ookah-cum-spiff."

As I was taking the train to Albany last week I saw my protege surge 'into the Grand Central. He had a message to deliver to the train and the gateman had just begun to close the gate. To see him straight-arm six porters, follow the interference of an old lady in a wheel chair, shake off four special policemen, reverse his field and plant his message squarely on the observation platform of the rear car was a sight I shall never forget. The crowded concourse broke into a roar. "Touchdown! Touchdown!" rang up to the blue vault. Men, women and children fell into a snake dance. My boy had won a great victory for the A.D.T. If he is not one day president of the company there is nothing in first performances.

Another athlete, a distance runner, I put in the railroad business, as a track walker. Any number of railroad presidents have started as brakemen, express clerks and mechanics. This boy has it on them all. He is starting back of scratch, so to speak. His duty is to patrol ten miles of track on a New England branch, between Peru and Athens, Vt., which sounds much further than it is. He is supposed to remove from the track bits of paper, cigarette butts, banana peels, corn silk and other objects which may derail trains. How can he fail to rise? There is no other direction to go. The boy is using his bean, too. He wrote me on Wednesday last. "The job is great. I am supposed to cover my beat once a day. I did it four times yesterday and don't have to look at the damn road till next Monday." I look for great things to happen to this young man.

SOME months ago I asked an applicant, "What did you do to distinguish yourself in college?"

"I sang," he said. "I made the glee club in my freshman year, took four trips with them, going as far south as New Orleans and as far west as Denver."

"Enough," I interrupted. "Report tomorrow at 9.32 at the office of Bleistein and Katz, 27 Pearl Street. Ask for Mr. Katz. I will phone him."

He got the job.

His line is lingerie. In every town that boy has the entree to the best homes. The social connections formed at teas, receptions, dances and dinners have proved invaluable. At my suggestion, on making Cleveland for instance, he avoids the business establishments. He does not present his card at Bumpus Brothers' department store. Nay, nay. He drives out Euclid Avenue to the Bumpus mansion and asks for the daughter of the house. "You won't remember me," he says, "but I met you at the country club dance last year after the glee club concert." Does she remember him? Well, rather. A dinner follows. Over the cigars, with Bumpus fere, the subject of lingerie is delicately broached. The next day the senior Bumpus signs along the dotted line.

Let me urge young men still in college who tour the country with their musical and dramatic organizations to think not only of punch and petting. Indulge in these distractions if you must but, at the same time, keep a careful record of whose punch you are drinking and whose daughter you are petting. It will be invaluable to you.

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We are living in a commercial age. I explained this to a young man who had been his class poet and who proposed the precarious wooing of the Muse as a livelihood.

"Don't make me laugh," I said. "You are no longer a class poet but a mass poet and there is a difference. The pay, to begin with, is a pittance. Prose, yes ... I think I can place you. There is a vacancy in the proof room of the Subway Sun."

"No," he protested, "My soul must find expression on a more exalted plane. I dream dreams and I've got to get them out of my system."

"So be it," I assented. "Young fellow-my-lad, I am going to put you into the advertising game."

He looked horrified but I proceeded.

"You do not realize it because you are young but the great poets today are all turning out publicity. What are the lines, today, that stick in the mass memory and become a part of the living language? 'A skin you love to touch.' The hand of Time rests lightly on the head which uses something or other, some sort of hair renewer. Read the description of the new house, garage and garden development on the Hackensack Meadows, 'the Home Lovers Trinity,' the 'Three-in-One of Bungalow Bliss.' There is where your real poetry is being written, practical poetry. Do you follow me?"

He did. And he got the job.

Some of my readers may have seen the circulars describing "Hasbrouck's Silkola", "the sheen of silk at the cost of cotton, in shades as soft as the smile of a sleeping infant or as brilliant as the eye of a gypsy dancing girl." This is the work of my friend, the class poet.

A graduate chemist came to me.

"What did you make in your laboratory work?" I asked.

"Smells," he said.

He is now a successful perfume manufacturer. Soif d'Amour and Baiser Furtif are two of his creations.

There is one type of college man for whom I make an exception by recommending him at the very outset for a position at the top; namely, the silent, heavy man who wins college honors by looking wise and saying nothing. I have no hesitancy in pushing this type into positions of importance in the banking world. They should never start at anything lower than vice-president of a trust company. On boards of directors they are invaluable. I have had the pleasure of seeing a number of my boys, gifted with this eloquent dumbness, elected to one board after another so that all they have to do is to attend meetings regularly, say nothing and collect the souvenir gold pieces. The only failure I have had in this category was a youth who, after a year on the board of an important assurance company, thought that the gift of tongues had descended upon him. He lost the job.

And what shall I say of the student, as such—the man who has used his four years at college to educate himself, who wears a Phi Beta Kappa key and who stands proudly on class day before his fellows as Salutatorian or Valedictorian? What of him? Not much.

He is an anachronism. Teaching is open to him, though many of the things he has studied are becoming obsolete. Midas is ousting Minerva and the classics are giving way to courses in business management and brick laying. But there are still the grade schools. As Dr. Ordway of Memphis University said in his recent address, "We scholars can still point .with pride to the fact that the Phi Beta Kappa key will still unlock any school house in the country—up to the grade of high school!"

It is something. The West calls loudly for teachers. If the young tutor finds, after a year in Cicero, Mo., that he cannot live on his salary, ($800. a year is bid) as Dr.. Ordway says, "Why live?" I have passed through Cicero once and I agree with the Doctor.

And, in closing, just a word in regard to our young divines, graduates of the theological seminaries. Theirs is not the narrow field it once was. There has been a renaissance of the reforming spirit in the United States and the way of the reformer is easy if he only has the lung power. If he be of the easy-going type who wishes to be a popular pastor, going from one affluent "call" to another, he has but to introduce some of the newer religious wrinkles, the orchestral accompaniments, tribal rites, Maori folk dances and sun worshipping ceremonies, be they ever so loosely linked with the ritual of orthodox Christianity. I should recommend that he ally himself with undergraduate dramatics and take at least one sabbitical year on Broadway under Dr. Morris Gest or Professor Ziegfeld.

This is for purely technical study. His knowledge of men's hearts and the wickedness that lies therein will not be amplified. Desire Under the Elms is the same everywhere and he can learn all that it is good for him to know about morals by watching the graduates who return annually for ther class reunions.