INTRODUCTION
Judd is an old carpenter who has done odd jobs on our place for the past ten years. Just how old he is I don’t know, but he’s pretty old; his hands are gnarled and calloused and his finger nails chewed up and broken by hammer blows; there are knotted veins in his forehead and his hair is grey and thin. But he works like a beaver, and don’t you ever hint that he should slow up—he will hoot at you, and say that he can lick any young feller with one hand. He will hitch his harness into place—he has a rupture, and wears some kind of truss—and will slide under the house to connect up a gas pipe, and come crawling out with his hair and eyes full of cobwebs, and my wife will say, “Come out of there, you old gopher.” He adores her when she talks to him like that, he would lift the side of the house to please her. The two of them engage in violent arguments as to how a door ought to be hung or a tree pruned. “Nobody ever did it like that,” Judd declares—and considers that sufficient reason. He does it her way, so long as she stands over him; but if she leaves, he is apt to finish it his way—for, after all, it is manifest that a man knows better than a woman.
Ten years ago our home was a row of vacant lots on a hillside, covered with weeds and rusty cans. Now it is an old-fashioned Southern house with a long veranda and a row of white columns, surrounded by rose gardens and grape arbors and fig trees and oranges. The house was made out of five old houses, bought for a little more than nothing, and moved onto the place and joined together; the gardens were made by my wife sticking baby plants into the ground, and holding a hose over them all day and part of the night. I helped a little; and two school boys helped after hours; but Judd was the Hercules who did most of this mighty labor. He would rout us out of bed in the morning, and many a time we have worked after dark, to get a roof over something before it rained, or finish a concrete job before it set. What is there we haven’t done together?—digging ditches and setting fence-posts, hoeing weeds and pruning trees, laying shingles and tacking down tarpaper, cleaning old furniture and painting an automobile, moving a garage and installing a sprinkler system. And always with a presiding female genius hovering over us, exhorting and appraising, mostly on the debit side! Never was there such a woman for saving, and for devising, and for utilizing. Once Judd in his digging came upon a rusty iron spike, and showed it secretly to me. “Better throw it over the hill quick,” he said. “If the missus sees that, she’ll start a railroad!”
When the house was done, there was a party. The living room is extra fancy, with high, peaked ceiling, and lights way up, dim and mysterious; in a million years you’d never guess that it was once an old tailor shop, bought for a hundred dollars, and moved over here, and the upper floor taken out! Well, our friends came, some of them rich people in limousines, creating a sensation in our neighborhood. The neighbors were invited—it is a working-class part of town, and a few people came, shy and a little distrustful, and picked out seats with backs to the wall, and sat stiff and silent, while George Sterling, great poet and genial soul, told us intimate recollections of Joachim Miller and Ambrose Bierce and Jack London, and other old-time California writers.
Judd wore his best clothes, and a stiff collar, and brought a lady friend in black satin. We were surprised by this, for we knew that Judd was a widower of many years’ standing; we teased him afterwards about this lady, and he blushed, but insisted there was “nothing to it”—and apparently there wasn’t, for he still lives alone in the house he has built, with a fire-place made of every kind of shiny colored stone you can find on the beaches of California. There is a porch to this house and a lot of fancy concrete work, that will last Judd’s life-time and longer. You must understand, this is no “hard-luck story,” quite the contrary; Judd has got to be a rich man in the course of ten years, with war-time wages of a dollar an hour. He put his savings into two lots, and his spare time into building three houses on them, and now he has two of them rented, and he goes trout-fishing every spring, and deer-hunting in the fall, and he took a trip to Texas just to have the fun of spending some of his money, instead of leaving it all to his nephews. When he comes now to do odd jobs for us, it is by way of a favor; and he says, “Well, you got a new book now?” Of course I always have, and he demands a copy, and insists it must be cloth, and autographed; and then we have our regular argument as to whether he shall pay for it, and we compromise on the basis of his paying the wholesale price. He tells me what he thinks about my writings, and just what is wrong with my ideas.
Judd, you understand, is not the least bit of a “radical.” “I got no use for these ‘reds,’” he says, being a simon pure, hundred per cent American; there are too many foreigners in the country, and if they don’t like it, let them get out. But at the same time Judd is nobody’s fool. For one thing, he is “onto” the politicians; they are a bunch of crooks, and he proves it, telling me things that are going on right in Pasadena—he knows from this friend or that who works for the city. Also, Judd is “onto” the politicians at Washington; of course you can’t get the facts, because the newspapers won’t print them, but look at this oil business, and look at the fellows that got a billion dollars from the government, pretending to make airplanes for the war, and they never got a single fighting-plane to France. Judd supported the war, and bought liberty bonds with his savings; but he says that if the truth was known, we could have kept out of that war, if it hadn’t been for the munition-makers, and the bankers and their loans to England and France.
So you see, we have plenty to talk about while nailing down shingles and screwing up water-pipe! Once, not so long ago, Judd said to me, “By golly, I never thought of that!” I answered, “You’d be surprised to know how many things you never thought of.” Said he: “Why don’t you write a book for fellows like me? A workingman is tired when he gets home, and don’t have time for big books, and he don’t know the long words. But you write something short and easy, and show us little fellows just how we get it in the neck.”
Well, there are lots of things one would like to write, and one doesn’t get around to them all. But every now and then I think about Judd, and the millions of other Judds there are, scattered over this great land. I think of things I’d like to say to them, if only I could get to them. Here it is, Thanksgiving morning of the year 1925; and just why this morning should have chosen itself, I can’t imagine, but I am sitting at my typewriter, on the very porch that Judd helped to build, and came crawling out from under with his hair and eyes full of cobwebs—the old gopher! I am beginning the book he asked me to write, for him and the other American workingmen.