To Your Good Health
By Paul G. Donohue, M.D.
Identifying
Alzheimer’s Disease
DEAR DR. DONOHUE:
On TV, a commentator said Alzheimer’s
disease is known as the disease of the four
A’s. What are those four A’s? -- M.C.
ANSWER: I
don’t know. I’m pretty sure they were
devised either by that commentator or by someone
whom he heard speak. I can list the more common
Alzheimer’s symptoms, and, by stretching
things, I can come up with three A’s.
Loss of memory is
a prominent symptom, and most Alzheimer’s
patients don’t realize how bad their memory
is. The "A" word here would be
"amnesia." In addition, people with
this condition have trouble with abstract
thinking -- a second "A" word. An
example of abstract thinking is maneuvering
numbers, as you’d do in balancing your
checkbook.
Difficulty with
language is another sign. Such difficulties
include constantly using the wrong words or
forgetting the meaning of simple words. By really
stretching things, this could be called
"aphasia," a third "A."
Another sign of
Alzheimer’s is the inability to do routine
tasks, things that people do without giving them
a second thought. Poor judgment is yet another
sign. On a cold day, an Alzheimer’s patient
might go out with only a T-shirt.
Alzheimer’s makes it hard for people to get
their bearings; they become lost even in
surroundings that should be familiar.
On misplacing
something like their keys, Alzheimer’s
patients often look for them in outlandish
places, like the refrigerator. They have rapid
swings in their mood. Frequently, they suffer an
about-face in their personality. A pleasant,
friendly person becomes suspicious of everyone
and acts in a gruff, abrasive manner. If any
reader knows M.C.’s four A’s, please
write.
LETTERS from
a SELF-MADE
MERCHANT
to his SON.
by George Horace Lorimer
First published
October, 1902
Being the Letters
written by John Graham, Head of the House of
Graham & Company, Pork-Packers in Chicago,
familiarly known on ‘Change as "Old
Gorgon Graham," to his Son, Pierrepont,
facetiously known to his intimates as
"Piggy."
No.10
FROM John Graham, at the
Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son,
Pierrepont, at the Commercial House,
Jeffersonville, Indiana. Mr. Pierrepont has been
promoted to the position of traveling salesman
for the house, and has started out on the road.
X
CHICAGO, March 1, 189-
Dear Pierrepont:
When I saw you start off yesterday I was just a
little uneasy; for you looked so blamed important
and chesty that I am inclined to think you will
tell the first customer who says he doesn’t
like our sausage that he knows what he can do
about it. Repartee makes reading lively, but
business dull. And what the house needs is more
orders.
Sausage is the one
subject of all others that a fellow in the
packing business ought to treat solemnly. Half
the people in the world take a joke seriously
from the start, and the other half if you repeat
it often enough. Only last week the head of our
sausage department started to put out a tin-tag
brand of frankfurts, but I made him take it off
the market quicker than lightning, because I knew
that the first fool who saw the tin-tag would ask
if that was the license. And, though people would
grin a little at first, they’d begin to look
serious after a while; and whenever the butcher
tried to sell them our brand they’d imagine
they heard the bark, and ask for "that real
country sausage" at twice as much a pound.
He laughs best who
doesn’t laugh at all when he’s dealing
with the public. It has been my experience that,
even when a man has a sense of humor, it only
really carries him to the point where he will
join in a laugh at the expense of the other
fellow. There’s nothing in the world
sicker-looking than the grin of the man
who’s trying to join in heartily when the
laugh’s on him, and to pretend that he likes
it.
Speaking of
sausage with a registered pedigree calls to mind
a little experience that I had last year. A
fellow came into the office here with a
shriveled-up toy spaniel, one of those curly,
hairy little fellows that a woman will kiss, and
then grumble because a fellow’s mustache
tickles. Said he wanted to sell him. I
wasn’t really disposed to add a dog to my
troubles, but on general principles I asked him
what he wanted for the little cuss.
The fellow hawed
and choked and wiped away a tear. Finally, he
fetched out that he loved the dog like a son, and
that it broke his heart to think of parting with
him; that he wouldn’t dare look Dandy in the
face after he had named the price he was asking
for him, and that it was the record-breaking,
marked-down sacrifice sale of the year on dogs;
that it wasn’t really money he was after,
but a good home for the little chap. Said that I
had a rather pleasant face and he knew that he
could trust me to treat Dandy kindly; so--as a
gift--he would let me have him for five hundred.
"Cents?"
says I.
"Dollars,"
says he, without blinking.
"It ought to
be a mastiff at that price," says I.
"If you
thought more of quality," says he, in a tone
of sort of dignified reproof, "and less of
quantity, your brand would enjoy a better
reputation."
I was pretty hot,
I can tell you, but I had laid myself open, so I
just said: "The sausage business is too poor
to warrant our paying any such price for
light-weights. Bring around a bigger dog and then
we’ll talk;" but the fellow only shook
his head sadly, whistled to Dandy, and walked
off.
I simply mention
this little incident as an example of the fact
that when a man cracks a joke in the Middle Ages
he’s apt to affect the sausage market in the
Nineteenth Century, and to lay open an honest
butcher to the jeers of every dog-stealer in the
street. There’s such a thing as carrying a
joke too far, and the fellow who keeps on
pretending to believe that he’s paying for
pork and getting dog is pretty apt to get dog in
the end.
But all that
aside, I want you to get it firmly fixed in your
mind right at the start that this trip is only an
experiment, and that I am not at all sure you
were cut out by the Lord to be a drummer. But you
can figure on one thing--that you will never
become the pride of the pond by starting out to
cut figure eights before you are firm on your
skates.
A real salesman is
one-part talk and nine-parts judgment; and he
uses the nine-parts of judgment to tell when to
use the one-part of talk. Goods ain’t sold
under Marquess of Queensberry rules any more, and
you’ll find that knowing how many rounds the
Old ‘Un can last against the Boiler-Maker
won’t really help you to load up the junior
partner with our Corn-fed brand hams.
A good many
salesmen have an idea that buyers are only
interested in baseball, and funny stories, and
Tom Lipton, and that business is a side line with
them; but as a matter of fact mighty few men work
up to the position of buyer through giving up
their office hours to listening to anecdotes. I
never saw one that liked a drummer’s jokes
more than an eighth of a cent a pound on a tierce
of lard. What the house really sends you out for
is orders.
Of course, you
want to be nice and mellow with the trade, but
always remember that mellowness carried too far
becomes rottenness. You can buy some fellows with
a cheap cigar and some with a cheap compliment,
and there’s no objection to giving a man
what he likes, though I never knew smoking to do
anything good except a ham, or flattery to help
any one except to make a fool of himself.
Real buyers
ain’t interested in much besides your goods
and your prices. Never run down your
competitor’s brand to them, and never let
them run down yours. Don’t get on your knees
for business, but don’t hold your nose so
high in the air that an order can travel under it
without your seeing it. You’ll meet a good
many people on the road that you won’t like,
but the house needs their business.
Some fellows will
tell you that we play the hose on our dry salt
meat before we ship it, and that it shrinks in
transit like an all-wool suit in a rainstorm;
that they wonder how we manage to pack solid
gristle in two-pound cans without leaving a
little meat hanging to it; and that the last car
of lard was so strong that it came back of its
own accord from every retailer they shipped it
to. The first fellow will be lying, and the
second will be exaggerating, and the third may be
telling the truth. With him you must settle on
the spot; but always remember that a man
who’s making a claim never underestimates
his case, and that you can generally compromise
for something less than the first figure. With
the second you must sympathize, and say that the
matter will be reported to headquarters and the
boss of the canning-room called up on the carpet
and made to promise that it will never happen
again. With the first you needn’t bother.
There’s no use feeding expensive "hen
food" to an old Dominick that sucks eggs.
The chances are that the car weighed out more
than it was billed, and that the fellow played
the hose on it himself and added a thousand
pounds of cheap salt before he jobbed it out to
his trade.
Where you’re
going to slip up at first is in knowing which is
which, but if you don’t learn pretty quick
you’ll not travel very far for the house.
For your own satisfaction I will say right here
that you may know you are in a fair way of
becoming a good drummer by three things:
First--When you
send us Orders.
Second--More
Orders.
Third--Big Orders.
If you do this you
won’t have a great deal of time to write
long letters, and we won’t have a great deal
of time to read them, for we will be very, very
busy here making and shipping the goods. We
aren’t specially interested in orders that
the other fellow gets, or in knowing how it
happened after it has happened. If you like life
on the road you simply won’t let it happen.
So just send us your address every day and your
orders. They will tell us all that we want to
know about "the situation."
I was cured of
sending information to the house when I was very,
very young--in fact, on the first trip which I
made on the road. I was traveling out of Chicago
for Hammer & Hawkins, wholesale dry-goods,
gents’ furnishings and notions. They started
me out to round up trade in the river towns down
Egypt ways, near Cairo.
I hadn’t more
than made my first town and sized up the
population before I began to feel happy, because
I saw that business ought to be very good there.
It appeared as if everybody in that town needed
something in my line. The clerk of the hotel
where I registered wore a dicky and his cuffs
were tied to his neck by pieces of string run up
his sleeves, and most of the merchants on Main
Street were in their shirt-sleeves--at least
those that had shirts were--and so far as I could
judge there wasn’t a whole pair of galluses
among them. Some were using wire, some a little
rope, and others just faith--buckled extra tight.
Pride of the Prairie XXX flour sacks seemed to be
the nobby thing in boys’ suitings there.
Take it by and large, if ever there was a town
which looked as if it had a big, short line of
dry-goods, gents’ furnishings and notions to
cover, it was that one.
But when I caught
the proprietor of the general store during a lull
in the demand for navy plug, he wouldn’t
even look at my samples, and when I began to hint
that the people were pretty ornery dressers he
reckoned that he "would paste me one if I
warn’t so young." Wanted to know what I
meant by coming swelling around in song-and-dance
clothes and getting funny at the expense of
people who made their living honestly. Allowed
that when it came to a humorous get-up my clothes
were the original end-man’s gag.
I noticed on the
way back to the hotel that every fellow holding
up a hitching-post was laughing, and I began to
look up and down the street for the joke, not
understanding at first that the reason why I
couldn’t see it was because I was it. Right
there I began to learn that, while the Prince of
Wales may wear the correct thing in hats,
it’s safer when you’re out of his
sphere of influence to follow the styles that the
hotel clerk sets; that the place to sell clothes
is in the city, where every one seems to have
plenty of them; and that the place to sell mess
pork is in the country, where every one keeps
hogs. That is why when a fellow comes to me for
advice about moving to a new country, where there
are more opportunities, I advise him--if he is
built right--to go to an old city where there is
more money.
I wrote in to the
house pretty often on that trip, explaining how
it was, going over the whole situation very
carefully, and telling what our competitors were
doing, wherever I could find that they were doing
anything.
I gave old Hammer
credit for more curiosity than he possessed,
because when I reached Cairo I found a telegram
from him reading: "Know what our competitors
are doing: they are getting all the trade. But
what are you doing?" I saw then that the
time for explaining was gone and that the moment
for resigning had arrived; so I just naturally
sent in my resignation. That is what we will
expect from you--or orders.
Your affectionate
father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
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