It was a morning of artistic creation. Fifteen
minutes after the purple prose of Babbitt’s
form-letter, Chester Kirby Laylock, the resident salesman
at Glen Oriole, came in to report a sale and submit
an advertisement. Babbitt disapproved of Laylock,
who sang in choirs and was merry at home over games
of Hearts and Old Maid. He had a tenor voice,
wavy chestnut hair, and a mustache like a camel’s-hair
brush. Babbitt considered it excusable in a family-man
to growl, “Seen this new picture of the kid—husky
little devil, eh?” but Laylock’s domestic
confidences were as bubbling as a girl’s.
“Say, I think I got a peach of an ad for the
Glen, Mr. Babbitt. Why don’t we try something
in poetry? Honest, it’d have wonderful
pulling-power. Listen:
’Mid pleasures
and palaces,
Wherever you may roam,
You just provide the
little bride
And we’ll provide
the home.
Do you get it? See—like ‘Home
Sweet Home.’ Don’t you—”
“Yes, yes, yes, hell yes, of course I get it.
But—Oh, I think we’d better use something
more dignified and forceful, like ’We lead, others
follow,’ or ‘Eventually, why not now?’
Course I believe in using poetry and humor and all
that junk when it turns the trick, but with a high-class
restricted development like the Glen we better stick
to the more dignified approach, see how I mean?
Well, I guess that’s all, this morning, Chet.”
By a tragedy familiar to the world of art, the April
enthusiasm of Chet Laylock served only to stimulate
the talent of the older craftsman, George F. Babbitt.
He grumbled to Stanley Graff, “That tan-colored
voice of Chet’s gets on my nerves,” yet
he was aroused and in one swoop he wrote:
Do you respect your loved
ones?
When the last sad rites of bereavement are over, do
you know for certain that you have done your best
for the Departed? You haven’t unless they
lie in the Cemetery Beautiful,
the only strictly up-to-date burial place in or near
Zenith, where exquisitely gardened plots look from
daisy-dotted hill-slopes across the smiling fields
of Dorchester.
Sole agents
Babbitt-Thompson
realty company
Reeves Building
He rejoiced, “I guess that’ll show Chan
Mott and his weedy old Wildwood Cemetery something
about modern merchandizing!”
He sent Mat Penniman to the recorder’s office
to dig out the names of the owners of houses which
were displaying For Rent signs of other brokers; he
talked to a man who desired to lease a store-building
for a pool-room; he ran over the list of home-leases
which were about to expire; he sent Thomas Bywaters,
a street-car conductor who played at real estate in
spare time, to call on side-street “prospects”
who were unworthy the strategies of Stanley Graff.
But he had spent his credulous excitement of creation,
and these routine details annoyed him. One moment
of heroism he had, in discovering a new way of stopping
smoking.
