With this stake I moved to Chicago and rented a suite of offices at the corner of Madison and Paulina Streets, then the heart of the shooting belt. The suite comprised a reception room and a silo. There was no need of a consultation or operating room because by the time my patients reached the outer door, they were so full of stray bullets that it was too late to do anything but identify them. I made my money by keeping them in the silo until a reward was offered for information as to their whereabouts. Sometimes it was years or even never, owing to a way Chicago husbands and wives had in those days of leaving home on interminable bats, and as a rule, the party left behind either took the prolonged absences as a matter of course or was not aware of same.
The following incident is typical of the Chicago of that time:
A boy named “Hi” Fever was trying to acquire enough money to attend college by selling subscriptions to Risky Stories. His father had suggested that he call on one L. H. Tweek. The boy rang the doorbell at the Tweeks’ and Mrs. Tweek answered it. “Hi” asked if her husband was at home.
“I don’t know,” replied Mrs. Tweek. “I have a vague recollection that he said something about going to the Follies opening at the Colonial.”
“But,” said the Fever boy, “that show’s opening was in December and it is now August.”
“Is it?” exclaimed Mrs. Tweek. “Well, in another month we can have oysters again!”
My silo was finally filled to overflowing by unclaimed cases and it seemed advisable to move to another part of town. I put up a tent in Grant Park and hung out a shingle inscribed, “Surgeon. Cold Cuts a Specialty.” The park was always popular with employees of Loop offices and department stores during their lunch hour and thousands of them took advantage of the opportunity to enjoy their midday meal and undergo some necessary operation at the same time. The potato salad which I served with the cold cuts was covered with a sort of ether dressing and from each patron I managed to remove at least his tonsils without his being any the wiser. A certified public accountant once estimated that if all the tonsils I cut out during lunch hours were laid end to end, it would be a nuisance.
I was now nineteen years of age and thinking of getting married. I consulted a friend of mine, Dr. Flip.
“Dr. Flip,” I said, “I was thinking about getting married.”
“I wish I had,” was his reply.
“What? Got married?”
“No,” he said. “Just thought about it.”
XIV
My 2 Big Inventions
America was now taking its place with the rest of the world in the arts and sciences and the year 1899 saw two great inventions, by citizens of the United States, which were universally hailed as revolutionary and daring. The first of these was the invention of the straw, by Paul Whelton, a Boston newspaper man. Mr. Whelton worked on the paper nights and in the daytime held a position as lifeguard at Revere Beach. In those days the Atlantic Ocean in the vicinity of Boston was way over your head and Revere bathers were being drowned by the thousands despite the courage and resourcefulness of Mr. Whelton and his two assistants, Nick Flatley and Mel Webb.
The chief lifeguard sat on the beach day after day, for months and months, watching the drowners drown and trying to figure out what was the matter. The idea came to him all of a heap.
“The idea came to me all of a heap,” was the way he afterwards expressed it.
It occurred to him all of a heap that as each drowner was drowning for the third time, he seemed to appear to be clutching. And there was nothing to clutch at!
“If they just had something to clutch at!” thought Mr. Whelton, and that night, as he worked at the copy desk in the newspaper office, he thought suddenly of a straw, and the problem was solved.
Resigning from the paper, he started the quantity manufacture of straw and in a few days appeared on the beach with an armload of the new commodity. As each bather came out of the bathhouse, Mr. Whelton approached him in a friendly way and said, smilingly: “Have a straw.”27
People kept on drowning, but it was soon established that there was less danger if they bathed in straw stacks than in the ocean.
Mr. Whelton would not take money for the straws doled out for clutching purposes, but he soon found two other uses for his invention in which his conscience did not prevent acceptance of financial return. He began selling straws to the weather bureau and to sailors, outfielders and golfers, so they could tell which way the wind was blowing. And also, along about this time, the sport of camel hunting became quite popular through New England. “The ship of the desert” was very good eating as well as sufficiently foxy and elusive to make the pursuit interesting. New England camels, however, were deathly afraid of horses, horses, horses and you had to hunt them on foot.
And after you had walked miles and miles for a camel and finally caught up with him, there was no sure way of bringing him down. He scoffed at bullets, sniggered over knife thrusts and
