Top-DrawerSeventhGradeProse（原文）
2021-10-04 21:50阅读：
Top-Drawer Seventh Grade
Prose
Russell Baker
1 I began working in
journalism when I was eight years old. It was my mother’s idea. She
wanted me to “make something” of myself and, after a levelheaded
appraisal of my strengths, decided I had better start young if I
was to have any chance of keeping up with the
competition.
2 The flaw in my
character which she had already spotted was lack of “gumption.” My
idea of a perfect afternoon was lying in front of the radio
rereading my favorite Big Little
Book,
Dick
Tracy Meets Stooge
Viller. My mother despised
inactivi
ty. Seeing me having a good time in repose, she was powerless to
hide her disgust. “You’ve got no more gumption than a bump on a
log,” she said. “Get out in the kitchen and help Doris do those
dirty dishes.”
3 My sister Doris, though
two years younger than I, had enough gumption for a dozen
people. She positively enjoyed washing dishes, making beds, and
cleaning the house. When she was only seven she could carry a piece
of short-weighted cheese back to the
A&P,threaten the manager with legal
action, and come back triumphantly with the full quarter-pound we’d
paid for and a few ounces extra thrown in
for forgiveness. Doris could have made something of herself if she
hadn’t been a girl. Because of this
defect, however, the best she could hope for was a career as a
nurse or schoolteacher, the only work that capable females were
considered up to in those days.
4 This must have saddened my mother,
this twist of fate that had allocated all the gumption to
the daughter and left her with a son who
was content with Dick Tracy and Stooge Viller. If
disappointed, though, she wasted no energy on self-pity. She
would make me make something of myself whether
I wanted to or not. “The Lord helps those who
help themselves,” she said. That was the way her mind
worked.
5 She was realistic about the difficulty.
Having sized up the material the Lord had given her to mold, she
didn’t overestimate what she could do with it. She didn’t insist
that I grow up to be President of the
United States.
6 Fifty years ago parents still asked
boys if they wanted to grow up to be President, and asked it not
jokingly but seriously. Many parents who were hardly more than
paupers still believed their sons could do it. Abraham Lincoln had
done it. We were only sixty-five years from Lincoln. Many a
grandfather who walked among us could remember Lincoln’s time.
Men of grandfatherly age were the worst for asking if you wanted
to grow up to be President. A surprising number of little boys
said yes and meant it.
7 I was asked many times
myself. No, I would say,
I didn’t want to grow up to be President. My
mother was present during one of these interrogations. An elderly
uncle, having posed the usual question and exposed my lack of
interest in the Presidency, asked, “Well, what
do you want to be when you grow
up?”
8 I loved to pick through trash piles and
collect empty bottles, tin cans with pretty labels, and discarded
magazines. The most desirable job on earth sprang instantly to
mind. “I want to be a garbage
man,” I said.
9 My uncle smiled, but my mother had
seen the first distressing evidence of
a bump budding on
a log. “Have a little
gumption, Russell,” she said. Her calling me Russell was a signal
of unhappiness. When she approved of me I
was always “Buddy.”
10 When
I turned eight years old she decided that the job of starting me on
the road toward making something of myself could no longer be
safely delayed. “Buddy,” she said one day, “I
want you to come home right after school this afternoon.
Somebody’s
coming and I want you to
meet him.”
11 When I burst
in that afternoon she was in conference in the parlor with an
executive of the Curtis Publishing Company. She introduced
me. He bent low from the waist and shook my hand. Was it true as my
mother had told him, he asked, that I
longed for the opportunity to conquer the world of
business?
12 My mother replied that I was blessed
with a rare determination to make something of myself.
13 “That’s right,” I
whispered.
14 “But have you got the grit, the
character, the never-say-quit spirit it
takes to succeed in business?”
15 My mother said I
certainly
did.
16 “That’s
right,” I said.
17 He eyed me silently for a long
pause, as though weighing whether I could be
trusted to keep his confidence, then spoke
man-to-man.Before taking a crucial step, he said,
he wanted to advised me that working for the Curtis Publishing
Company placed enormous responsibility on a young man. It was one
of the great companies of America. Perhaps the greatest publishing
house in the world. I had heard, no
doubt, of the Saturday Evening
Post?
18 Heard
of it? My mother said that everyone in our house had heard of
the Saturday Evening Post and that
I, in fact, read it with religious devotion.
19 Then
doubtless, he said, we were also familiar with those two monthly
pillars of the magazine world, the Ladies Home
Journal and the Country
Gentleman.
20 Indeed we were familiar with them,
said my mother.
21 Representing
the Saturday Evening Post was one
of the weightiest honors that could be bestowed in the world of
business, he said. He was personally proud of being
a part of that great corporation.
22 My
mother said he had every right to be.
23
Again he studied me as though debating whether
I was worthy of a knighthood.
Finally:“Are you
trustworthy?”
24 My mother said I
was the soul of honesty.
25
“That’s right,” I
said.
26 The caller smiled
for the first time. He told me I was a
lucky young man. He admired my spunk. Too many young men thought
life was all play. Those young men would not go far in this world.
Only a young man willing to work and save and keep his face washed
and his hair neatly combed could hope to come out on top in
a world such as ours. Did I
truly and sincerely believe that I
was such a young man?
27 “He certainly does,” said my
mother.
28
“That’s right,” I
said.
29 He said he had been so impressed by
what he had seen of me that he was going
to make me a representative of the Curtis Publishing Company.
On the following Tuesday, he said, thirty freshly printed copies of
the Saturday Evening Post would be delivered at our door. I
would place these magazines, still damp with the ink of the
presses, in a handsome canvas bag, sling it over my shoulder, and
set forth through the streets to bring the best in journalism,
fiction, and cartoons to the American public.
30 He had
brought the canvas bag with him. He presented it with reverence
fit for a chasuble. He showed me how to drape the sling over my
left shoulder and across the chest so that the pouch lay easily
accessible to my right hand, allowing the best in journalism,
fiction, and cartoons to be swiftly extracted and sold to a
citizenry whose happiness and security depended upon us soldiers of
the free press.
31 The following
Tuesday I raced home from school, put the
canvas bag over my shoulder, dumped the magazines in, and,
tilting to the left to balance their weight on my right hip,
embarked on the highway of journalism.
32 We lived in
Belleville, New Jersey, a commuter town at the northern fringe of
Newark. It was
1932, the bleakest year of the
Depression. My father had died two years before, leaving us with a
few pieces of Sears, Roebuck furniture and not much else,
and my mother had taken Doris and me to live with one of her
younger brothers. This was my Uncle Allen. Uncle Allen had made
something of himself by 1932. As salesman
for a soft-drink bottler in Newark, he had an income of
$30 a week; wore pearl-gray spats, detachable
collars, and a three-piece suit; was happily married;
and
took in
threadbare relatives.
33 With
my load of magazines I headed toward
Belleville Avenue. That’s where the people were. There were two
filling stations at the intersection with Union Avenue, as well as
an A&P, a fruit stand, a bakery, a
barber shop, Zuccarelli’s drugstore, and a diner shaped like a
railroad car. For several hours I made
myself highly visible, shifting position now and then from
corner to corner, from shop window to
shop window, to make sure everyone could see the heavy black
lettering on the canvas bag that said THE SATURDAY
EVENING POST. When the angle of the light
indicated it was suppertime, I walked
back to the house.
34 “How
many did you sell, Buddy?” my mother
asked.
35
“None.”
36
“Where did you
go?”
37 “The
corner of Belleville and Union
Avenues.”
38
“What did you
do?”
39 “Stood
on the corner waiting for somebody to buy a
Saturday Evening
Post.”
40
“You just stood
there?”
41
“Didn’t sell a single
one.”
42
“For God’s sake,
Russell!”
43
Uncle Allen intervened. “I’ve been thinking about it
for some time,” he said,
“and I’ve about decided to take the
Post regularly. Put me down
as a regular
customer.” I handed him a magazine
and he paid me a nickel. It was the first nickel
I
earned.
44
Afterwards my mother instructed me in salesmanship.
I would have to ring
doorbells, address adults with charming self-confidence, and
break down resistance
with a sales talk pointing out that
no one, no matter how poor, could afford to be
without the Saturday
Evening Post in the
home.
45 I told my mother
I’d changed my mind about wanting to succeed in the
magazine business.
46 “If
you think I’m going to raise a good-for-nothing,” she replied,
“you’ve got
another think coming.” She told me to hit
the streets with the canvas bag and start
ringing doorbells the instant school was out next day.
When I objected that
I didn’t
feel any aptitude for salesmanship, she asked how I’d like to
lend her my leather belt
so she could whack some sense into me.
I bowed to superior will and
entered
journalism with a heavy heart.
47 My
mother and I had fought this battle
almost as long as I could remember. It
probably started even before memory began, when
I was a country child in northern
Virginia and my mother, dissatisfied with my father’s plain
workman’s life,
determined that I would not grow up
like him and his people, with calluses on their
hands, overalls on their backs, and fourth-grade educations
in their heads. She had
fancier ideas of life’s possibilities.
Introducing me to the Saturday Evening
Post, she
was trying to wean me as early as possible from my father’s
world where men left
with their lunch pails at sunup, worked with their hands
until the grime ate into
the pores, and died with a
few sticks of mail-order furniture as their
legacy. In my
mother’s vision of the better life there were desks and white
collars, well-pressed
suits, evenings of reading and lively talk, and perhaps—if a
man were very, very
lucky and hit the jackpot, really made something important of
himself—perhaps there
might be a fantastic salary of
$5,000 a year to support a big house and
a Buick with a
rumble seat and a vacation in Atlantic City.
48 And so
I set forth with my sack of magazines.
I was afraid of the dogs
that
snarled behind the doors of potential buyers.
I was timid about ringing the
doorbells
of strangers, relieved when no one came to the door, and
scared when someone did.
Despite my mother’s instructions, I could not deliver an
engaging sales pitch. When a
door opened I simply asked, “Want
to buy a Saturday Evening Post?”
In Belleville
few persons did. It was a town of
30,000 people, and most weeks I
rang a fair
majority of its doorbells. But I
rarely sold my thirty copies. Some weeks I
walked
around the entire town for six days and still had four or
five unsold magazines on
Monday evening; then I dreaded the
coming of Tuesday morning, when a batch of
thirty fresh Saturday Evening
Posts was due at the front door.
49
“Better get
out there and sell the rest of those magazines tonight,” my
mother
would say.
50 I usually posted myself
then at a busy intersection where a
traffic light
controlled commuter flow from Newark. When the light turned
red I stood on the curb and shouted my sales pitch at the
motorists.
51 “Want to buy
a Saturday Evening
Post?”
52 One
rainy night when car windows were sealed against me
I came back soaked and with not a single sale to
report. My mother beckoned to Doris.
53 “Go
back down there with Buddy and show him how to sell these
magazines,” she said.
54 Brimming with
zest, Doris, who was then seven years old, returned with me
to
the corner. She took a magazine from the bag, and when the
light turned red she
strode to the nearest car and banged her small fist against
the closed window. The
driver, probably startled at what he took to be a midget
assaulting his car, lowered the
window to stare, and Doris thrust a Saturday
Evening Post at
him.
55 “You
need this magazine,” she piped, “and it only costs a
nickel.”
56 Her
salesmanship was irresistible. Before the light changed half a
dozen times
she disposed of the entire batch. I
didn’t feel humiliated. To the contrary.
I was so
happy I decided to give her a treat. Leading her to the
vegetable store on Belleville
Avenue, I bought three apples,
which cost a nickel, and gave her one.
57 “You
shouldn’t waste money,” she
said.
58 “Eat
your apple.” I bit into
mine.
59 “You
shouldn’t eat before supper,” she said. “It’ll spoil your
appetite.”
60
Back at the house that evening, she dutifully reported me for
wasting a nickel.
Instead of a scolding, I was
rewarded with a pat on the back for having the good
sense
to buy fruit instead of candy. My mother reached into her
bottomless supply of
maxims and told Doris, “An apple a
day keeps the doctor
away.”
61 By the
time I was ten I
had learned all my mother’s maxims by heart. Asking
to
stay up past normal bedtime, I knew
that a refusal would be explained with, “Early to
bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and
wise.” If I whimpered about
having to get up early in the morning, I could depend on her
to say, “The early bird
gets the
worm.”
62 The
one I most despised was,
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
This
was the battle cry with which she constantly sent me back
into the hopeless struggle
whenever I moaned that
I had rung every doorbell in town and knew there
wasn’t a
single potential buyer left in Belleville that week. After
listening to my explanation,
she handed me the canvas bag and said, “If at first you don’t
succeed...”
63
Three years in that job, which I
would gladly have quit after the first day
except
for her insistence, produced at least one valuable result. My
mother finally concluded
that I would never make something
of myself by pursuing a life in business and
started considering careers that demanded less competitive
zeal.
64 One
evening when I was eleven I brought home a
short “composition” on my
summer vacation which the teacher had graded with an A.
Reading it with her own
schoolteacher’s eye, my mother agreed that
it was top-drawer seventh grade prose
and
complimented me. Nothing more was said about it immediately,
but a new idea had
taken life in her mind. Halfway through supper she suddenly
interrupted the
conversation.
65 “Buddy,” she said,
“maybe you could be a
writer.”
66
I clasped the idea to my heart.
I had never met a writer, had shown no
previous
urge to write, and hadn’t a notion how to
become a writer, but I loved stories
and
thought that making up stories must surely be almost as much
fun as reading them.
Best of all, though, and what really gladdened my heart, was
the ease of the writer’s
life. Writers did not have to trudge through the town
peddling from canvas bags,
defending themselves against angry dogs, being rejected by
surly strangers. Writers
did not have to ring doorbells. So
far as I could make out, what
writers did
couldn’t even be classified as
work.
67 I was
enchanted. Writers didn’t have to have any gumption
at all. I did not dare
tell anybody for fear of being laughed at in the schoolyard,
but secretly I decided that
what I’d like to be when I grew up
was a writer.
