-Caveat Lector- An excerpt from: The Ohio Gang Charles L. Mee, Jr.©1981 M. Evans and Company, Inc. 216 East 49th Street New York, New York 10017 ISBN 0-87131-340-5 218 pps — out-of-print/one edition --[3]-- VII. The Little Nigger His SCHOOLMATES CALLED him a "little nigger." He had dark hair and a dark complexion, and the rumor was that his great-great-grandfather Amos had been a West Indian black or that some other member of the family had been a mulatto, and Warren could not be sure. Although he denied it, he could not get over the taunting and whispering. Marked from birth as an outsider, he spent his life trying to get in, to blend with the crowd. Whatever complexities of character may have played through him, he smoothed them over, repressed or hid them. He was just another country boy: he swam in the creek, he played sandlot baseball, he painted barns and houses, he milked cows and curried horses. He was always noticed as a boy who was kind to others, who did not believe in name calling, and who was charitable to those who were different or somehow flawed. He attended a one-room schoolhouse in Blooming Grove and memorized passages from the McGuffey Eclectic Readers, and although he seemed to make no special effort at his studies, it was clear that he was smarter than his schoolmates. When his father moved the family to a little yellow house in nearby Caledonia, Warren distinguished himself there in school as someone who was good at spelling long words and who (after those years of nurturing by his mother) "shone at recitations." But his dilemma—to stand out, and at the same time to blend in—held him in a particularly tight grip. His first chance to resolve the dilemma occurred when his father brought home a B-flat cornet one day. Warren's father had acquired it in one of his trades. Warren, age ten, was taught to play by a local harness maker, and soon Warren was good enough to join the Caledonia Aeolian Band, which held forth in the local bandstand on Saturday nights and occasionally played a stint in a neighboring town. Harding, said one of his boyhood chums, "could execute No. 24 in the Black Book with personal sangfroid and astonishing musical force. Barring the bass drummer, no other member of the band could make as much noise." ===== VIll. The Happy Booster IN THE SUMMER of 1875, when Warren was still ten, his father made a keen trade and acquired the ownership of the town's downand-out newspaper, the Caledonia Argus, a journal that appeared whenever its editor was able to scrape together enough money to buy some paper. The editor, Will Warner, who was also the paper's publisher, reporter, typesetter, distributor, and janitor, was kept on the job by Warren's father, and Warren and a friend went in to the newspaper office to help. Will Warner wore a top hat at work and must have looked like an eccentric scarecrow: he was a vision that Harding never forgot. Warren swept the floor, delivered papers, washed down the press, and returned bits of type to the type tray, and occasionally he was allowed to set some type himself and help to print up a page of the paper. Will Warner gave Warren a makeup-rule, a tiny steel ruler, about two-and-a-half inches long, and Harding kept it as a lucky piece-his only such talisman-for the rest of his life. The makeup rule was a memento of his first "grown-up" job (even, to be sure, despite its lamentably modest size, a symbol of manhood); it was a reminder of Will Warner, a man who did not fear to stand out in his top hat; it was a reminder of all of those values of the small-town newspaper-its boosting, neighborly, cheerful, good news, family-praising, commerce-plugging principles that gave Harding, finally, a way to promote himself by promoting others, to stand out without asserting himself. When Harding was fourteen, he went off to nearby Iberia College. Fourteen was not an unusually young age to begin a college career at the time, although not all young Ohio boys aspired to such intellectual heights. The college had a teaching faculty of three-two clergymen and a professor of ancient languages, and Harding graduated-as one of his boyhood chums said, taking the edge off Harding's distinction as a college man-either "first or second in his class," since there were only two graduates from the college that year. He drifted then, like his father, alarmingly. He returned home-his father had moved the family once more, this time a few miles west, to Marion, the county seat-and Warren taught school there for a term and then abandoned it. His father picked up some old lawbooks in a trade, and Harding read those for a while, with the thought of becoming a lawyer, but then gave up on that. Nothing felt quite right to him. He took a job as an insurance salesman for a short time, but he made a mistake in his calculations, sold policies at the wrong rate, became discouraged, and quit. He had a talent for words, and he enjoyed playing with his talent. "Hasn't it been wet and slippery," he wrote to an aunt at the time he was teaching school. "The ice facilitated falling and all seemed to embrace-the opportunity of an easy fall. One morning I saw several new constellations when on my way to educational headquarters but, they soon disappeared only to be seen by a similar fall. The floods, however, did not effect the Marionites to any extent. How is Uncle Dan, Mother, Grandma'am, and the rest of the relatives? I am coming up when school closes then I will visit all, Gert included PERHAPS. How does Cass sail forth? Stingy as ever, I suppose. Does he 'mash'?" He had a good mind, but not a great one, and it had little to work on, so that it became lazy and merely facile. Harding's real genius lay in ingratiating himself with people, and that was a talent that he practiced constantly, on everyone, male and female, up and down the social scale, friend and stranger, until he was perhaps the most ingratiating man in America. He took to hanging around the local livery stable and the courthouse. He lifted the occasional glass in a bar, and he paid occasional visits to the town's whorehouses. He took up playing poker on Saturday nights. Above all, he liked to talk, to pass the time. of day, to exchange pleasantries, to idle away the hours discussing politics; bloviating, he called it. But no job suited him exactly. Nothing fit his needs quite as perfectly as newspapering. In the spring of 1884, his father acquired another newspaperputting up his interest in a house lot (that he had got in another trade) in exchange for a half-interest in a dying local paper, the Marion Star. Warren moved in with the august title of editor; but his stint was cut short when a lien was placed against the house lot that his father had put up for the paper. When it looked as though Warren would turn to full-time bloviating again, his father arranged for him to take a job with Colonel James Vaughan, who ran another paper in Marion, the Mirror. Warren worked as a reporter, ad salesman, and delivery boy, but not for long. Vaughan fired him for loafing and for spending too much time hanging around the local Republican party headquarters. Vaughan was a Democrat. Soon after Warren was fired, two of his old pals from the Caledonia Aeolian Band appeared in Marion—Jack Warwick and Johnnie Sickle. The three young men decided to get together and buy back the Marion Star. They figured they could get it for $300. Johnnie Sickle had just inherited $1,600; he put up his $100. Jack Warwick, who had no money, borrowed $100 from Sickle. Warren went to Colonel Vaughan and convinced the colonel that a revived Marion Star would be a fine nuisance for the colonel's only competitor in Marion, the Republican Independent. They started with nothing, setting their own type, writing and editing and selling ads and delivering copies door to door, juggling the books, keeping one step ahead of the sheriff to avoid one lien or another. Their editorial policy was simple and straightforward: "to boom Marion and Marion men against all outsiders," Jack Warwick said. "Every enterprise was given all the attention the traffic would bear.... We exploited railroads that never got beyond the blueprint and we saw smoke rolling out of the chimneys of factories before the excavations were made for the foundations." If he possibly could, Harding kept unpleasant stories out of his paper. He wanted to be an agreeable neighbor, and he wanted, too, to avoid making things any harder for men "whose weaknesses got them into trouble." "Jack," he said one day to Warwick, "I wish we could cut out all police court news." "First," Warwick said, "do away with the police court then. "Of course, that can't be done, but some day I hope to keep such stuff out of the paper. In the meantime we can disregard much of it and minimize the rest." Marion was a town of about five thousand in population. It had been a market town and then a grain center, trading on the surrounding fields of corn and alfalfa that began just at the edge of town. With the coming of the railroad, the town acquired some industries as well. Edward Huber, for instance, had arrived in Marion the year that Harding was born, and had begun to manufacture hayrakes. Within twenty years, he was making an array of farm tools and a patented threshing machine and had formed a new company with a young fellow who had invented a steam shovel. By the time Harding was publishing the Star, the Huber Manufacturing Company had more than seventy employees and sold a million dollars worth of machinery every year. The town grew, and Harding's newspaper grew with it, partly because of Harding's hard work and his editorial policy of flattering Marion, and partly because everything flourished in Marion in those days. New residential streets cropped up with fine new homes, the finest of them large wooden American castles with broad front porches, verandahs, swings and railings, lawns that rolled on continuously from one house to the next in neighborly openness. Marion soon had a new Baptist church, a new music hall, a new jail, new businesses and opportunities of every kind that Harding celebrated in-the Star. Their office was on the second floor of an old building in the center of town, and Harding could walk every morning from his family's run-down house in a shabby section of town to his office, saying hello to those he met along the way, greeting them by first name, finding out about new babies, businesses, gossip, and schemes. The Star's office had been an old job-printing shop, and along with the name of the paper and five hundred subscribers who were casual about paying their ten cents a week subscription money, Harding and his partners took over a thirdhand, manually operated Fairhaven press, and enough type to set a few pages of news before breaking up the printing forms, redistributing the type, and setting a few more pages. "At distributing type," Warwick said of Harding, "he was not up to the average journeyman, but at distributing ink he was a star of the first magnitude. He loved ink to the point of taking it unto his bosom.'' Harding's own office sported a brass cuspidor on top of his desk, and he felt so at home in the office that he sometimes spent the night. Some of the help, itinerant printers, newsboys, and others spent the night sometimes, too. In time, Harding and his partners were able to afford a large new counter in the offices, where they could receive people who wanted to come in to place ads in the newspaper. "The new counter," War-wick said, ". . . soon justified itself. Though never crowded by day, it was at times crushed to its capacity by night, being long enough only for two to sleep on comfortably." The boys in the office called him W.G., and he dropped into the newsroom and pressroom, such as they were, frequently, even after the enterprise was so prosperous that he and his Caledonia pals no longer did all the work themselves. He might ask who had a plug of tobacco, and bite off a chaw. Once, when the boys in the pressroom were short of tobacco, W.G. went out, got a plug, returned a few minutes later, and nailed the plug to the wall for all to cut off a slice whenever the need came on. He loved the printing press and the type; he enjoyed the companionship of his cronies; he took a paternal interest in the newsboys; he loved to put his feet on his desk, look out the window, and pass the time bloviating. He had a weakness for tramp printers, who would drift into Marion, set type for a while, sleep in the Star offices, and then wander on. He seemed, Warwick said, "thoroughly to understand these irresponsible, carefree wanderers. To him the hidden treasures of their souls were revealed and he saw them not as tramp printers, but as men capable of human emotions"—as his mother understood his father, or should have. Among the tramp printers who stood out among the rest was Colonel Hargot. "Tall and dignified, he always wore a high silk hat that was the worse for wear and a Prince Albert coat. The colonel was one who didn't like work, but he liked Warren G. because Warren G.'s clothes fitted Colonel Hargot. The colonel carried a cane to show that the world owed him a living." One of the others who came and went was Shorty Johnson, and when Shorty appeared in town after some brief or lengthy absence, he would invariably step into the Star office with the cheerful, everhopeful salutation: "How are you fixed?" Another of the old regulars was a Civil War veteran who always bedded down in a pile of old newspapers and, by way of bidding good-night, would say, "Wake me up when Kirby dies"—whoever that had been. Harding was never heard to shout, or even to raise his voice, certainly not to throw a temper tantrum. His self-control was so complete as to seem entirely natural. His pals and colleagues took him as one of the boys, and he was enormously popular. He was not, however, without ambition. He allowed a grumbling difference of opinion with Sickle to fester until Sickle threw in his hand and moved out West; and he won Warwick's interest in the Star in a game of poker—a loss that the easygoing Warwick never held against Harding, or let get in his way of staying on as an employee. "He was one of us," Warwick said, "and he insisted that we worked 'with him' not 'for him.'" But, henceforth, Harding owned the paper. ===== IX. The Perfect Marriage HE MARRIED THE daughter of the richest man in town-which showed something both of his father's urge to trade up, and his mother's sense of the finer things. Florence Kling was the daughter of Amos Kling, the town's financier who had begun as a clerk in a hardware store, taken over the business, moved his capital into mortgages and real estate, organized some banks, backed the building of the brand-new Marion Hotel, which cost $30,000, and become the richest man in Marion. He opposed his daughter's marriage to Harding. Indeed, when he met Harding at the courthouse one day, he cursed out his daughter's fiance and called him a nigger. Amos did not attend the wedding, and he did not visit the young couple's house until twenty-two years later. Florence's mother was Louisa Bouton of New Canaan, Connecticut, who could trace her ancestry back to a distinguished family of French Huguenots who landed in America in 1635. Florence had, then, both new money and old distinction in her lineage. Florence had been married once before to Pete DeWolfe, the scion of an even more distinguished family, by Marion standards, than the Klings—the DeWolfe's being an "older" family and the proprietors of the local coal yard. Florence and Pete had a son, who grew up, after his parents' divorce, in the home of his Kling grandparents, neglected by his mother. He died at the age of thirty-five of alcoholism. Amos had evidently wanted his daughter to be a boy, and Florence grew into a hardheaded, awkward, somewhat ungainly young woman, strong willed and dominating. Jack Warwick said that one day when she was horseback riding her mount started to buck and rear- frightening the men who stood helplessly nearby. She battled the horse until, at last, both horse and rider toppled over to the ground. Warwick said that as the horse went over, "the rider slipped to the ground and when the animal was prostrate, caught him by the bridle, pinned his head to the ground, and sat on it until the fiery steed had time to give his better instincts a chance to work." Some years later, one of Florence's secretaries said that her "well-kept hands were a speaking index to her character. They were unusually large, strong, powerful, crushing, indicating ability to firmly grasp and capacity to overcome all obstacles. In appearance her hands did not fit her delicate body. This incongruity was illustrative of a further disparity; she had the dominant, driving brain of a strong man, and the exquisite, frail body of the gentlewoman." Strong but delicate, powerful but frail, domineering but often ill, she had very beautiful, alert blue eyes. She moved quickly; she was energetic, clear minded, purposeful, and decisive. Harding called her "the Duchess," and she had those qualities, too, of a slight haughtiness, a sense of deserved superiority, of the right to be demanding, of a somewhat chilly nature, the person beyond whom there was no further appeal. She was the perfect match for him: she was five years older than Harding, and she had the fierce loyalty to "her Warren," and the pride that his mother had. She expected him to succeed, and like his mother, she held him firmly to the high standards that would bring success, money, recognition. He needed her, or felt he did, to keep himself from backsliding, laziness, shiftlessness, whim. When it came to taking a wife, he had chosen well, and he knew it. Immediately following the wedding, Harding was overcome by fits of indigestion that were so severe and so impossible to assuage that he was compelled, by the end of the year, to go to the health sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan, for two months. After his rest cure, he returned to his bride-and was overcome once more by chronic indigestion that was so painful and relentless that he had to return to Battle Creek for fully five months. Following this second session at Battle Creek, he was able to return home and stay there-although, from time to time, he would have to go back to Battle Creek for respite, and he never, for the rest of his life, fully overcame his indigestion. pps. 44-57 --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. 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