THE BILL POSTER’S VISIT.
The Bill Poster was a stranger to most every one in the outfit. He traveled a month ahead of the show on Advertising Car No. 2, and while he hung around during the run in New York he never got well enough acquainted to mix in with the ring bank squatters. While the outfit had great respect for him, and especially for his work, he wasn’t generally understood, and this did not keep his popularity up to par. He always seemed solid with the business staff and called the assistant treasurer by his first name, and these two conditions were known to the sawdust boys. They always took off their hats to anybody on the staff, and the man in the ticket wagon was only known at the pay-off. Then, too, he dressed well and wore a diamond, that is, a real one, and altogether his financial condition was too good.
But for some reason or other the Bill Poster did happen back on the show one afternoon. Just after the matinee, when the gang sat down on the bank for the spiel, he was seen walking across the track, and the boys at once began to speculate on what brought the paste spreader back to home. Some of them thought it was for a call-down, and the concert manager declared that was the cause, for, said he, “I never seen a town billed so rotten as this un.” But the gasoline man, who was a close observer, thought different. He knew that there was a little fairy working in the Fall of Rome ballet that was sweet on the paste boy, and he put the rest of the crowd wise before the conversation got too far from the shore.
“Cert’nly,” he said. “Didn’t I see the guy in his plaid rags ev’ry night when he was playin’ the Garden, gittin’ the little lady at the dressin’ room door and blowin’ her off to butter cakes an’ coffee before she chases to the bridge an’ home.”
The gasoline man was getting real gabby on the love affair, when the Bill Poster came through the red curtains over the dressing tent entrance and walked across the ring to where the gang sat in the shadows. He had a sassy little “Howdy” for everybody and then passed around a box of Turkish cigarettes. Everybody passed it up, and the Boss Canvasman bit off a two-by-three chew from his plug and looked sour.
“Slipped back to see the Boss,” said the Bill Poster, as he lighted one of the Turkish boys with a match he took out of a sterling box that had a beer ad. on it. “Ain’t no secret; I want a transfer. I’m good an’ tired of the slow work on No. 2 car, an’ so I gets a day off an’ runs back to see if the Boss won’t put me with the opposition crew.”
The gang was silent. Nobody had asked for the why, so nobody commented on it. The fact that he was going to have nerve enough to ask to get in the opposition crew filled the concert manager with disgust, for he knew something about bill posting, and also knew that it took a triple-plated crackerjack to hold a place with this crowd of rush pasters of a three-ring outfit.
“There’s nothin’ to it,” continued the Bill Poster, “gettin’ into a town where ev’rything is dead ready, all the boards up, and nothing to do but paste. I want a little excitement. I allus gets it in the winter, when I’m billin’ a hall show. Many a time I’ve laid me bundle of lithos under a doorstep to punch some guy who was tearin’ down my stuff in saloons where I’d spent up me money, and then hangin’ his stuff in the window. I tell you the opposition crew is the crowd to have the ginger. When your car is hangin’ up on a grassy sidin’ an’ you gits a wire that the other show is routin’ three days ahead of your own bookin’s, it makes you jump. The boss wires the head of the gang to jump for the town and beat ’em up. Beat ’em out, but on the level, legitimate—but beat ’em up. Don’t tear down none of their billin’, but kill it if you have to buy the side of the Presbyterian meetin’ house to git a showin’ for them nine-colored twenty-eight sheet stands.”
As far as the gang on the bank was concerned, the Bill Poster was talking Greek, and he had ’em wingin’. The Concert Manager thought he was “next,” but his coupling broke before his understanding left the city limits. Just then the Press Agent of the Big Show happened in and the talk hadn’t gone three lengths before the Bill Poster and the newspaper man crossed bayonets. Both were doing the publicity gag, and both had a well set and riveted idea that each one and not the other was bringing the people into the tent and giving the show a good gate to send back on the statement to the high hat boys in the city who were doing the financing.
“Let me tell you something,” said the Press Agent, as serious as if he was arguing to get a half column write-up on fourteen dollars’ worth of advertising in the only daily in the town. “Let me tell you. These days the people who are spending money for amusements reads the papers, and it’s the paper talk that lands the coin at the window. I know what I’m talkin’ about. Bill posting is all right, but it’s the newspaper work that does the real singin’.”
“Come off!” said the Bill Poster. “You’re only pluggin’ your own job. You don’t mean to tell me that the boss of this outfit would keep all the printin’ shops in Cincinnatty goin’ night an’ day to git out the wall stuff if they didn’t think it was some good. An’ say, they wouldn’t be runnin’ three billin’ cars ahead of this here show if there wasn’t some come-back to the money they was blowin’. Why, say, what do you think they are? Your press work is all right, an’ my bill postin’ is all right, an’ you’ve got to have both.”
“Well, maybe you’re right,” said the Press Agent; “I guess they use the billing to emphasize my work.”
“I don’t know so sure what you means, partner,” said the Bill Poster, “but the Boss of our car figgers it out this way: He says that the readin’ in the papers about the big show makes ’em look at the pictures on the wall. And, says he, the pictures on the wall makes ’em read what is in the papers. An’, say, he’s been pastin’ since the John Robinson days.”
“Guess he’s right,” said the Press Agent.
This last statement hit the gang as real good sense, and they half agreed that the Bill Poster knew something about his business.
“I tell you, boys,” continued the Bill Poster, as he took a seat on the sawdust pile and lighted another one of the Sultan’s dreams, “in me dull moments, when we is travelin’ an’ there’s nothin’ to do but layin’ out paper an’ gittin’ the buckets ready, I figgers it out this way: You can git ’em with the paper talk all right; but there’s one thing you can do with good bill postin’ and litho work, an’ it’s this, you can’t make ’em read the papers, but bless me, you can make ’em see bill postin’. Say, me an’ the gang I work with in New York have sniped the subway fence so hard with red-on-yellows that you would think there was nothing else on Broadway. Did you see ’em? Well, you bet. There was so much color stickin’ along the ditch that it hurt your eyes when you rode by in a car. That’s what I claims for proper billin’. You can git it where they’ve got to see it.
“Say, to prove what I says is right, I’ll tell you a little experience I has. I was doin’ the litho work for a cheap price house that was playin’ the old favorites with a stock. They puts on ‘The White Squadron.’ The boss comes to me and says, ‘Look here, Jim, I wants you to do your best with this piece; its costin’ us a lot of money to get it on, and we wants to get it back. There’s a diamond stud coming to you if you gets what I calls a good showin’.’ Say, I would ’a’ done it anyhow for them kind words, but I says I’ll git that diamond if I puts bills all over the trees in Central Park an’ goes up in stripes for ten years for doin’ it. I was thinkin’ all the time some new gag to work, when one mornin’ comin’ down I reads that there’s a yacht race in Harlem river that afternoon. You know, boys, ‘The White Squadron’ is one of them naval pieces, an’ has a lot of ships in it. Well, the Sunday before I’d pasted up a lot of one an’ a half sheet boards with type an’ litho stuff, an’ I has it loaded in a wagon ready to git out on the street some night and sit the boards in doorways. But no, says I. Me partner an’ I drives the team out to the Harlem River bridge. The river is so thick with tugs and launches full of people to see the boat race that you can hardly find the water. We waits until the race starts, an’ then we clumps them boards into the river, carefully like, so they will fall with the picture side up. They hits the current and starts floatin’ down. They all seems to cling together, and make a big raft, an’ all you can see is ‘White Squadron.’ Everybody on the bridge and the boats is a readin’ and laughin’, and we knows it’s the showin’ of our lives. And say, the boards keeps on driftin’ wid the current an’ gits so thick that when the guys in the paper boats hits that part of the river they gits stuck and the race has to be called off.”
“Well,” said the Press Agent, coolly, “did the show do any business?”
“Business!” replies the Bill Poster; “you’d a thought there was a fire in the neighborhood ev’ry night, the crowd was there so thick fightin’ to git in. An’ say, the guys what got broke up in the boat race is so stuck on the joke that they gives a theatre party an’ the papers is full of it.”
“Yes,” said the Press Agent, “and it took the press agent to get that in the papers.”
“But the bill posters got ’em in the house,” retorted the Bill Poster, with the air of a man who had knocked the local welterweight over the ropes.