A Fistful of Fig Newtons

by Jean Shepherd

  The constant drive for financial success, which has played such an important role in creating the character of America, is well documented throughout the Johnson Smith catalog. One example is The Book of Great Secrets: One Thousand Ways of Getting Rich! (“To persons who work hard for a living and then don’t get it, we have a few plain words to say. Every person wants to make money and wants to make it fast and easy. This book will tell them how.”) For only a quarter this fantastic volume outlined moneymaking schemes ranging all the way from home recipes for Holland gin and to corn cures to a formula for treating “various diseases to which horses are subject.” It would be interesting to know the number of people who read this volume and then went on to fame and fortune using the Johnson Smith tested formula for making “Eye Water” or “Tomato Catsup.”

  To the superstitious and the basically ignorant, attaining wealth has often seemed to be a matter of either luck or secret, sinister, mystic knowledge. Johnson Smith stood ready to provide the struggling clod with the hidden key. If he couldn’t make it as an honest veterinarian or plumber he could at least master hypnotism and gain his ends by treachery. The pamphlet Mysteries of Clairvoyance is only one example of numerous appeals that Johnson Smith made to the superstitious side of rustic America:

  “How to make yourself a perfect operator. This work lifts the curtain and tells what some books only hint at.”

  “Discover Thebes and find out where the plunder is hidden.”

  “To see the issue of all ‘Pools,’ whether in stocks or financial matters. Be the MASTER.”

  “This book should be kept under lock and key. You don’t want everyone to be as wise as yourself.”

  All of this for only a thin dime.

  The mixture of primitive mysticism and modern technology is one of the things that makes the Johnson Smith catalog so endlessly fascinating. Its pages are jammed full of appeals to every human vice and fear. Cupidity, nobility, lust, piety–all are given equal space, and significantly there is never a sense of embarrassment or shame anywhere. Violence is taken for granted in almost every form of activity. “Emergencies” are continually encountered on every hand. Johnson Smith was pre-eminent in the field of providing personal tools of mayhem for the righteous. Nowhere is it hinted that the bad guys could, just as easily as the good, mail in their quarters for the “Silent Defender” or “Aluminum Gloves.” These case-hardened lightweight knuckledusters are described as “very useful in an emergency.” The buyer was advised to “buy one for each hand.”

  On the very next page we are tempted with the “Spring Steel Patent Telescopic Police Club,” “the most reliable arm for self-defense.” It was designed to be telescoped for concealment and could be carried in the hand without being noticed. When an “emergency” arose, this is what happened according to the caption writer: “Your adversary is caught quite unprepared and is landed a stinging blow of a totally unexpected nature, rendering him completely helpless.” Since this little beauty was made of spring steel, the writer was probably understating the case. The warning “Do not mistake this club with weak imitations” is well taken. Many items displayed in the catalog carry similar advice. Apparently there were unscrupulous “imitators” everywhere dealing in spurious exploding cigars, sneezing powder, hand grenades, and horse liniment. Since Johnson Smith always sold the real thing, there was a sense of security which went with a mailed order to Racine, Wisconsin. And there was something to it. In the glory days of the company, mail order flimflams were everywhere. Every magazine was filled with appeals to the unwary. Fifty cents sent off to an important-sounding address in Chicago most often brought nothing in return. Johnson Smith stood like a rock of integrity in the midst of this sneaky landscape.

  Johnson Smith also recognized something that only began to appear in more sophisticated advertising circles years later: that advertising must be entertaining in itself, whether or not the customer buys. They knew that if he read the catalog for sheer enjoyment eventually something would grab him. Throughout the catalog, usually at the bottom of the page, little gratis knee-slappers were thrown in.

  LAWYER: You say your wife attacked you with a death-dealing weapon. What was it?

  LITTLE TOD: A fly swatter.

  As feeble as this joke was, it made no attempt to sell. It was just there, like the dozens sprinkled throughout the catalog like raisins in rice pudding.

  There was one thing in the catalog more than any other that became identified with the company. It was sent everywhere and probably became as much of a classic in the field of vulgarity as any practical joke ever created. Johnson Smith introduced this zinger to the waiting populace, which immediately embraced it wherever yahoos proliferated and low buffoonery flourished. In fact, it sets the tone of the entire Johnson Smith catalog.

  The first time it appeared in the catalog few suspected that it would attain such timeless significance. Even today, one hears references to its unfailing success at achieving hilarity and bringing cringing embarrassment to its victims. There are few alive who have not heard of it, yet many have never actually seen one. Johnson Smith & Co., now of Detroit, Michigan, still carries a full line, and if you’d care to order one, they would be delighted to comply.

  “The Whoopee Cushion” says it all. Here is what Johnson Smith has to say about their classic:

  The Whoopee Cushion or Poo-Poo Cushion as it is sometimes called is made of rubber. It is inflated in much the same manner as an ordinary rubber balloon and then placed on a chair. When the victim unsuspectingly sits upon the cushion, it gives forth noises that can be better imagined than described.

  The accompanying illustration leaves nothing to the imagination.

  Today this catalog is just a very funny coffee-table curiosity, because we are still too close to the life and times it describes. In two hundred years it will be a truly significant historical and social document. It might well be the Rosetta Stone of American culture.

  You know what I’d like to do? It suddenly hit me. Some time when I’m coming through here late at night, and there are no cars behind me or ahead of me, I’m going to stop, jump out with a paint brush and a can of black paint, and paint a huge, jagged crack right down the side of that tile wall. The next son of a bitch that comes through is going to flee the tunnel screaming, “The tunnel cracked, the tunnel cracked!” like the mob in Thurber’s story about the day the dam broke in Columbus, Ohio.

  “The tunnel cracked, help, help, flee for your lives!” I wonder why they call practical jokes “practical”? That’s the one thing they aren’t.

  The line moved arthritically. Number 69, in the Charger, had fallen asleep, his head lolling back and forth on the cushions of the Dodge, a sorry crew of Scarlet Knights indeed; shaggy and tired from a weekend in the Eighth Street fleshpots. I studied each of them as we rolled slowly forward: a lumpish lot. Only divine intervention would get them their Rutgers diplomas, from what I could see. But then, you never can tell about God, and the academic world, I mused, remembering what Aunt Florence used to say:

  “If God had not wanted us to have meatloaf, then we wouldn’t have meatloaf.”

  Yes, God does work in mysterious ways. Take that time back in Pittinger’s class.

  Lost at C

  A wave of numbness surged through my body with stunning force. At last I knew what it felt like to be sitting with that brass hat on your skull with those straps around your ankles as the warden pulls the big switch. Out of the corner of my eye I caught the glint of Mr. Pittinger’s horn-rims and the ice-blue ray from his left eye. As the giant baroque equation loomed on the blackboard, my life unreeled before my eyes in the classic manner of the final moments of mortal existence. I was finished. Done. It had all come to this. Somehow I had always known it would.

  It all started in first grade at the Warren G. Harding School, where I was one among a rabble of sweaty, wrestling, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich eaters. But it was not until the end of the third month of school that I became dimly aware of
a curse that would folow me throughout my life. Along with Martin Perlmutter, Schwartz, Chester Woczniewski, Helen Weathers, and poor old Zynzmeister, I was a member of the Alphabetical Ghetto, forever doomed by the fateful first letter of our last names to squat restlessly, hopelessly, at the very end of every line known to man, fearfully aware that whatever the authorities were passing out, they would run out of goodies by the time they got to us.

  Medical science has finally begun to realize that those of us at the end of the alphabet live shorter lives, sweat more, and are far jumpier than those in the B’s and E’s and even the M’s and L’s. People at the tail end of the alphabet grow up accepting the fact that everybody else comes first. The Warren G. Harding School had an almost mystic belief in the alphabet; if you were a P, you sat behind every O, regardless of myopia.

  Me and Schwartz and Woczniewski sat so far back in the classroom that the blackboard was only a vague rumor to us. Miss Shields was a shifting figure in the haze on the distant horizon, her voice a faint but ominous drone, punctuated by squeaking chalk. Within a short time we became adept at reading the inflection, if not the content, of those far-off sounds, sensing instantly when danger was looming. Danger meant simply being called on. Kids in the front of the classroom didn’t know the meaning of danger. Ace test-takers, they loved nothing more than to display their immense knowledge by waving their hands frantically even before questions were asked. Today, when I think of the classrooms of my youth, I see a forest of waving hands between me and the teacher. They were the smart-asses who went on to become corporation presidents, TV talk-show hosts, and owners of cabin cruisers. Carson, Cavett, Steve Allen, Cronkite, Donahue–there isn’t a goddamn Woczniewski in the lot. Every one of those bastards grew up never doubting that he was destined to be at the head of the class, with the rest of the mob, the Schwartzes, the Zynzmeisters, forever in the Lumpenworld of the audience.

  We in the back of the classroom trod a rockier and far more dangerous path. Since we could neither hear nor see, we had only one course open if we were going to pass. The key was never to be called on. It was imperative never to be caught out in the open, if possible not to be seen at all. Each of us evolved his own methods of survival. Fat Helen Weathers could sweat at will, surrounding herself with a faint hazy cloud so that Miss Shields could never quite see her in focus, believing that Helen was just a thumb-smudge on her glasses. Perlmutter had a thin pale beaky face that you could not remember even while you were looking at it. He didn’t have to hide. No teacher ever remembered his name or whether he was even there. He’d sit for hours without moving a muscle, as anonymous as a pale hat rack. He was a born cost accountant.

  One day during an oral quiz, however–always a dangerous time for all of us–Perlmutter displayed the true stuff of champions. Miss Shields unaccountably called on him during an incomprehensible discussion involving the principal parts of speech, which seemed to be called “participles” or something like that. It was a discussion, naturally, only vaguely heard back in the ghetto. We thought Perlmutter was finished, but we had underestimated him. Without missing a beat, his face turned bright purple, his eyes bulged like a pair of overripe grapes, his neck throbbed, and a spectacular geyser of blood gushed from both nostrils.

  “This is terrible!” Miss Shields cried, scooping him up in her arms and rushing him to the nurse’s office, where he was excused from school for the rest of the day. She never called on him again.

  Schwartz, short, squat, built like a fireplug, would slowly scrunch down in his seat until only the top fringe of his crew cut could be seen, level with his desk. As for Zynzmeister, a strict Catholic, he sat so far behind even us that he spent his entire school career jammed up against the cabinet in the rear of the room where worn erasers, pickled biology specimens, and moldering lunches were stored; Zynzmeister, destined to go through life listed on the last page of every telephone directory. God only knows how he saw the rest of mankind in his troubled imagination; probably as an endless line snaking to the cosmic horizon, with poor Zynzmeister, shuffling from foot to foot, the very last person at the end of the Big Parade. His defense was religion; divine intervention. The click of his beads as they were counted kept up a steady castanet beat during Miss Shields’s distant cluckings. It seemed to work.

  My salvation was simple, yet deceptively difficult. I moved like a snake, bobbing and weaving, shifting my body from side to side, dropping a shoulder here, shifting my neck a few degrees to the right there, always keeping a line of kids between me and the teacher’s eagle eye. I blessed the Beehive hairdo when it became popular. I would have loved the Afro.

  For those rare but inevitable occasions–say, during a chicken-pox epidemic–when the ranks in the rows ahead were too thin to provide adequate cover, I practiced the vacant-eyeball ploy, which has since become a popular device for junior executives the world over who cannot afford to be nailed by their seniors in sales conferences and other perilous situations. The vacant eyeball appears to be looking attentively but, in fact, sees nothing. It is a blank mirror of anonymity. I learned early in the game that if they don’t catch your eye, they don’t call on you. Combined with a fixed facial expression of deadpan alertness–neither too deadpan nor too alert–this technique has been known to render its practitioner virtually invisible.

  The third, and possibly most important, tactic of classroom survival is thought control. When danger looms, it is necessary to repeat silently, with intense concentration, the hypnotic command Don’t call on me, Don’t call on me, Don’t call on me, sending out invisible waves of powerful thought energy until the teacher’s mind is mysteriously clouded. After endless hours of rehearsal before the mirror in the bathroom, I had developed a fourth and final gambit–my Cute Look: shy, boyish, a smile of such disarming cuddliness as to be lethal. I flashed it, of course, only with great caution, during comparatively safe periods in the classroom–upon entering and leaving–and at lunch, recess, I would warm teachers when their guard was down.

  Those of us in the back rows learned quickly that grades are handed out not on the basis of actual accomplishment but by intuitive feel. At that crucial moment when Miss Shields sat down to fill out my report card, I knew that my Cute Look would pop into her mind when my name appeared before her. Since she had nothing else to go on–other than catch-as-catch-can test answers gleaned from my shirt cuff or the blue book of the kid ahead of me–it was only natural for her to put down a B, which is all I ever wanted out of life.

  So it was that I weaved and bobbed, truckled and beamed my way through grade after grade at Warren G. Harding School. Perlmutter, Schwartz, Woczniewski, Helen Weathers, and I, as well as poor old Zynzmeister, sat on shore as the deepening river of education flowed by us unheard, unseen. Once in a great while, of course, a teacher would raise her voice above the usual bleat, or a transient air current would carry an isolated phrase or maybe even a full sentence all the way back to our little band, and this would often precipitate labored intellectual debates.

  Like the day we clearly caught the word marsupial. We knew it had something to do with animals, since Miss Robinette had pulled down a chart on which we could barely make out drawings of what could not have been people, unless they were down on all fours. After school that afternoon, Schwartz and Chester and I were kicking a Carnation can down an alley when a large police dog with one ear missing roared out from between two garages after a tomcat that must have weighed thirty pounds. The dog’s name was Ratso and he was owned by the postman, Mr. L. D. Johnson, who, I guess, kept him at home so that he could bite their postman when he delivered mail to their house.

  “Boy, I’d like to see old Rat go after one a them marsupials,” said Chester.

  “They lay eggs,” Schwartz stated with satisfaction. He had a way of saying things like that as though he had been the first to discover them, or at least had confirmed them through independent research.

  “You mean like ducks?” I asked. My hungry mind was questing for more knowledge.<
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  “Do they quack, too?” Chester asked.

  “How should I know?” said Schwartz, looking disgusted. “I ain’t no mind reader.”

  Thus the subject of marsupials was closed forever. They were never mentioned again in class, at least as far as I know, and to this day my entire knowledge of marsupials consists of what Schwartz told us about them.

  I can truthfully say that in all the years of my struggle through grade school at Warren G. Harding, I actually learned one true fact about the great world. For some reason, a mysterious vagary of acoustics perhaps, a complete sentence arrived back at our little ghetto headquarters one day:

  “Bolivia exports tin.”

  That is the sum total of my grade school education. I grabbed that fact like a drowning man clinging to a bobbing 2×4 in a trackless ocean. It has been endlessly useful ever since. At cocktail parties I silently bide my time, nibbling cashews and sipping my martini thoughtfully, and then, in a lull of the conversation, I drop my bomb: “But all of you have ignored the tin economy of Bolivia, a crucial point.” I saunter away as though in search of more intellectual companions, leaving behind a covey of stunned new admirers. Some men have achieved cabinet rank on the basis of one such fact.

  Warren G. Harding was widely known, during the dark ages when I was attending it, for being an “advanced” school, and actual tests were very rare. This worked in beautifully with our survival techniques and made it possible for me and my band of fellow ignoramuses to slide by year after year undetected. Although, of course, we didn’t know it at the time, we were part of the pioneering advance wave of generation upon generation of total illiterates that have been spawned by “progressive” education.

  At home, grade by grade, my reputation slowly grew until I was considered a truly superior intellect. This is one of the great American myths. It has persisted for ages–the unfailing belief that every generation is brighter, taller, more beautiful, than the one before it–in spite of obvious evidence to the contrary. Naturally, I did everything I could to encourage my old man in this belief. I must admit that I, too, firmly believed it. Every generation does, until, inevitably, the walls come tumbling down.