The Mornin' Mail is published every weekday except major holidays
Tuesday, May 22, 2007 Volume XV, Number 238

did ya know?

Did Ya Know?... The City of Carthage will be spraying for mosquitoes Monday, May 21st through Friday, May 25th. Areas will be sprayed in the evening of regular trash pickup, between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. It is recommended that citizens turn off attic or window fans when the sprayer is in the immediate area.

Did Ya Know?... The Jasper County Personal Property Assessor’s Office will be closed at Noon on Wednesday, May 23rd for training and will re-open on Thursday, May 24th at 8:30 a.m.

Did Ya Know?... Kelcey Schlichting, a local blind 5th grader is a finalist in the 7th annual National Braille Challenge to be held in Los Angeles, June 22 & 23. An account has been established at SMB bank to help raise funds for her transportation and food on the trip. Donations can be made at any SMB location.

today's laugh

I saw a man hit a girl today. I went right up to him and pulled him aside and said, "Only a coward would hit a woman - why don’t you hit a man?"

Then what happened?

That’s all I remember.

The automobile has increased the mortality rate, created appalling traffic problems, contributed to juvenile delinquency, showed half of America how to live beyond its income, and relieved us of the horsefly.

1907
INTERESTING MELANGE.
A Chronological Record of Events as they have Transpired in the City and County since our last Issue.

To Work Up His Bicycle Ride.

Andrew Griep, the daring young wheelman of this City, has determined to make his hazardous ride around the inside of a hoop track and leaves tonight for Kansas City and St. Louis to hunt for a manager - and someone willing to put up the money for his track, etc. He will visit his mother at Monett en route.

The plan for his inverted ride, with head downward, has been previously described in the papers. Griep has worked out his theory to his own satisfaction by rolling an iron ball down an incline and up around the inside of a hoop-like track. He then calculated his own weight as compared to the iron ball, and designed his track there-from.

Miss Jennie Lane, daughter of Judge Lane, formerly of Carthage, is here from Pittsburg, Kansas, visiting Mrs. C. Ragsdale and Mrs. Jennie Sheffield.

 

Today's Feature

Will Discuss Fireworks.

The Carthage City Council will meet this evening at 7:30 p.m. in the Council Chambers of City Hall. Council will hear the first reading of an ordinance authorizing the contract with A.M. Pyrotechnics for the City fourth of July fireworks display. The item comes from the Public Services Committee with a recommendation to approve the bid for the $15,000 show.

Other items on the agenda include the second reading of the ordinance that would execute the agreement between the City and Planning Works of Kansas City for a City comprehensive plan. This plan would be used to guide the growth of the City, providing a strategy for economic development and continued historic preservation. Planning Works bid for the comprehensive plan includes 6 workshops with the public and with City officials. It is estimated that the project will take one year to complete.

Council will also hear the second reading of an ordinance authorizing the lease of real estate for the construction of a complex for the doctors next to the new McCune-Brooks Hospital. This item is brought to Council by the McCune-Brooks Hospital Board.

Just Jake Talkin'
Mornin',
I’ve been experimentin’ with tryin’ to anticipate the timin that Letterman and Leno use with their gags. Leno is a little faster paced, more gags per minute. Letterman is more of a set up with fewer actual gags and more sight gags and makin’ faces.

If ya switch channels when Letterman starts one a his gags, you can usually catch a couple of Leno’s and still make it back in time ta see Letterman crossin’ his eyes and givin’ the punch line.

I think this is what they call "interactive" TV. The real fun is not the gags themselves or even the hosts. It’s the game of tryin’ to catch the most punch lines.

I suppose if ya really thought it was worth it, you could record one show and watch the other. But I doubt if many would really sit through that much fun.

This is some fact, but mostly,

Just Jake Talkin’.

Sponsored
by:
Mornin' Mail

To Your Good Health
By Paul G. Donohue, M.D.

Bypass Surgery Must Often be Repeated

DEAR DR. DONOHUE: In 1995 I underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery. Now, 11 years later, an angiogram was taken and I was told that the grafts are not functioning well. A vein from my left leg was used for the grafts. As a result, a second bypass appears to be imminent. Is this a common occurrence? -- I.C.

ANSWER: Heart artery grafts are an amazing medical triumph. They save lives. They prevent heart attacks. They bring blood to a blood-starved heart. However, they don’t cure the underlying processes that clog blood vessels. Those processes are atherosclerosis -- artery hardening -- and artery blockage with cholesterol, fat and other material.

Diet, exercise, weight loss, and cholesterol and blood pressure control are things over which people have control and which can keep arteries free of obstructing buildup. Genes, however, are something we cannot control. And their influence on artery hardening goes on. They also influence buildup in grafts.

In about 10 years after bypass surgery, plaque -- the obstructing buildup on artery walls -- greatly affects the flow of blood through many grafts. The degree to which it obstructs blood flow depends on how much people have done on their own to prevent plaque formation and how much influence their genes have on plaque buildup. It also depends on the kind of grafts used. Artery grafts resist plaque buildup better than vein grafts, but they are not always possible.

You are not unique. Repeat bypass surgery is relatively common.

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.2

FROM John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at Harvard University.

Mr. Pierrepont’s expense account has just passed under his father’s eye, and has furnished him with a text for some plain particularities.

II

Chicago, May 4, 198_

Dear Pierrepont: The cashier has just handed me your expense account for the month, and it fairly makes a fellow hump-shouldered to look it over. When I told you that I wished you to get a liberal education, I didn’t mean that I wanted to buy Cambridge. Of course the bills won’t break me, but they will break you unless you are very, very careful.

I have noticed for the last two years that your accounts have been growing heavier every month, but I haven’t seen any signs of your taking honors to justify the increased operating expenses; and that is bad business - a good deal like feeding his weight in corn to a scalawag steer that won’t fat up.

I haven’t said anything about this before, as I trusted a good deal to your native common-sense to keep you from making a fool of yourself in the way that some of these young fellows who haven’t had to work for it do. But because I have sat tight, I don’t want you to get it into your head that the old man’s rich, and that he can stand it, because he won’t stand it after you leave college. The sooner you adjust your spending to what your earning capacity will be, the easier they will find it to live together.

The only sure way that a man can get rich quick is to have it given to him or to inherit it. You are not going to get rich that way - at least, not until after you have proved your ability to hold a pretty important position with the firm; and, of course, there is just one place from which a man can start for that position with Graham & Co. It doesn’t make any difference whether he is the son of the old man or of the cellar boss - that place is the bottom. And the bottom in the office end of this business is a seat at the mailing-desk with eight dollars every Saturday night.

I can’t hand out any ready-made success to you. It would do you no good, and it would do the house harm. There is plenty of room at the top here, but there is no elevator in the building. Starting, as you do, with a good education, you should be able to climb quicker than the fellow who hasn’t got it; but there’s going to be a time when you begin at the factory when you won’t be able to lick stamps so fast as the other boys at the desk. Yet the man who hasn’t licked stamps isn’t fit to write letters. Natural, that is the time when knowing whether the pie comes before the ice-cream, and how to run an automobile isn’t going to be of any real use to you.

I simply mention these things because I am afraid your ideas as to the basis on which you are coming with the house have swelled up a little in the East. I can give you a start, but after that you will have to dynamite your way to the front by yourself. It is all with the man. I you gave some fellows a talent wrapped in a napkin to start with in business, they would swap the talent for a gold brick and lose the napkin; and there are others that you could start out with just a napkin, who would set up with it in the dry-goods business in a small way, and then coax the other fellow’s talent into it.

I have pride enough to believe that you have the right sort of stuff in you, but I want to see some of it come out. You will never make a good merchant of yourself by reversing the order in which the Lord decreed that we should proceed - learning the spending before the earning end of business. Pay day is always a month off for the spend-thrift, and he is never able to realize more than sixty cents on any dollar that comes to him. But a dollar is worth one hundred and six cents to a good business man, and he never spends the dollar. It’s the man who keeps saving up and expenses down that buys an interest in the concern. That is where you are going to find yourself weak if your expense accounts don’t lie; and they generally don’t lie in that particular way, though Baron Munchausen was the first traveling man, and my drummers’ bills still show his influence.

I know that when a lot of young men get off by themselves, some of them think that recklessness with money brands them as good fellows, and that carefulness is meanness. That is the one end of a college education which is pure cussedness; and that is the one thing which makes nine business men out of ten hesitate to send their boys off to school. But on the other hand, that is the spot where a young man has the chance to show that he is not a lightweight. I know that a good many people say I am a pretty close proposition; that I make every hog which goes through my packing-house give up more lard than the Lord gave him gross weight; that I have improved on Nature to the extent of getting four hams out of an animal which began life with two; but you have lived with me long enough to know that my hand is usually in my pocket at the right time.

Now I want to say right here that the meanest man alive is the one who is generous with money that he has to had to sweat for, and that the boy who is a good fellow at some one else’s expense would not work up into a first-class fertilizer. That same ambition to be known as a good fellow has crowded my office with second-rate clerks, and they always will be second-rate clerks. If you have it, hold it down until you have worked for a year. Then, if your ambition runs to hunching up all week over a desk, to earn eight dollars to blow on a few rounds of drinks for the boys on Saturday night, there is no objection to your gratifying it; for I will know that the Lord didn’t intend you to be your own boss.

You know how I began - I was started off with a kick, but that proved a kick up, and to the end every one since has lifted me a little bit higher. I got two dollars a week, and slept under the counter, and you can bet I knew just how many pennies there were in each of those dollars, and how hard the floor was. That is what you have got to learn.

I remember when I was on the Lakes, our schooner was passing out through the draw at Buffalo when I saw little Bill Riggs, the butcher, standing up above me on the end of the bridge with a big roast of beef in his basket. They were a little short in the galley on that trip, so I called up to Bill and he threw the roast down to me. I asked him how much, and he yelled back, "about a dollar." That was mighty good beef, and when we struck Buffalo again on the return trip, I thought I would like a little more of it. So I went up to Bill’s shop and asked him for a piece of the same. But this time he gave me a little roast, not near so big as the other, and it was pretty tough and stringy. But when I asked him how much, he answered "about a dollar." He simply didn’t have any sense of values, and that’s the business man’s sixth sense. Bill has always been a big, healthy, hard-working man, but to-day he is very, very poor.

The Bills ain’t all in the butcher business. I’ve got some of them right now in my office, but they will never climb over the railing that separates the clerks from the executives. Yet if they would put in half the time thinking for the house that they give up to hatching out reasons why they ought to be allowed to overdraw their salary accounts, I couldn’t keep them out of our private offices with a pole-ax, and I wouldn’t want to; for they could double their salaries and my profits in a year. But I always lay it down as a safe proposition that the fellow who has to break open the baby’s bank toward the last of the week for car-fare isn’t going to be any Russel Sage when it comes to trading with the old man’s money. He’d punch my bank account as full of holes as a carload of wild Texans would a fool stockman that they’d got in a corner.

Now I know you’ll say that I don’t understand how it is; that you’ve got to do as the other fellows do; and that things have changed since I was a boy. There’s nothing in it. Adam invented all the different ways in which a young man can make a fool of himself, and the college yell at the end of them is just a frill that doesn’t change essentials. The boy who does anything just because the other fellows do it is apt to scratch a poor man’s back all his life. He’s the chap that’s buying wheat at ninety-seven cents the day before the market breaks. They call him ‘the country’ in the market reports, but the city’s full of him. It’s the fellow who has the spunk to think and act for himself, and sells short when prices hit the high C and the house is standing on its hind legs yelling for more, that sits in the directors’ meetings when he gets on toward forty.

We’ve got an old steer out at the packing-house that stands around at the foot of the runway leading up to the killing pens, looking for all the world like one of the village fathers sitting on the cracker box before the grocery - sort of sad-eyed, dreamy old cuss - always has two or three straws from his cud sticking out of the corner of his mouth. You never saw a steer that looked as if he took less interest in things. But by and by the boys drive a bunch of steers toward him, or cows maybe, if we’re canning, and then you’ll see Old Abe move off up that runway, sort of beckoning the bunch after him with that wicked old stump of a tail of his, as if there was something mighty interesting to steers at the top, and something that every Texan and Colorado, raw from the prairies, ought to have a look at to put a metropolitan finish on him. Those steers just naturally follow along on up that runway and into the killing pens. But just as they get to the top, Old Abe, someways, gets lost in the crowd, and he isn’t among those present when the gates are closed and the real trouble begins for his new friends.

I never saw a dozen boys together that there wasn’t an Old Abe among them. If you find your crowd following him, keep away from it. There are times when it’s safest to be lonesome. Use a little common-sense, caution and conscience. You can stock a store with those three commodities, when you get enough of them. But you’ve got to begin getting them young. They ain’t catching after you toughen up a bit.

You needn’t write me if you feel yourself getting them. The symptoms will show in your expense account. Good-by; life’s too short to write letters and New York’s calling me on the wire.

Your affectionate father,

John Graham.

Copyright 1997-2007 by Heritage Publishing. All rights reserved.