And that was October. If a man who had seen the throng of that pleasant autumn day and thought it well-nigh impossible only had returned to the big store on a December day—say the Saturday before Christmas last—he would have thought that three hundred thousand would have been far nearer the mark of the eight and one-half hours. Could more folk have been squeezed through those wide doors and into those broad aisles? It would have seemed not. Even with the aid of a whole corps of special policemen and traffic rules as scientific and as ingenious as those which regulate the vehicular traffic of nearby Fifth Avenue, it was a task of a good half-hour to get within the huge mart; another half-hour to get out again. Certain departments—notably toys—possessed navigation problems of their very own, and other departments, such as refrigerators and other household goods, were comparatively deserted. The Christmas trade is nothing if not oddly balanced.
Through a store such as this one may wander, ad libitum, and find a new surprise at nearly every corner of it. Certainly upon each of its floors. Nor are these to be limited, in any way, to the floors to which the public is ordinarily admitted. Once I remember coming through the eighth floor and suddenly emerging upon a clean, crisply lighted little workshop. At a long bench underneath an atelier-like window three men, fairly well-advanced in years, were working. One was engraving upon silver—the other two upon glass. The chief of the shop explained to me that in the beginning they were Germans but they had been in Macy's so many, many years that they were today to be classed as pretty thoroughly Americanized. One of them had sat at that bench—and the one down in Fourteenth Street that had preceded it before the northward trek to Thirty-fourth Street—for over thirty-two years. The three men were artisans—of the old school and of a sort that seemingly is not bred these days.
"When they are gone I do not know where we shall go to replace them," said the superintendent.
"You will have to quit doing this sort of work?" I ventured.
He answered quickly:
"Oh no," said he, "Macy's never quits. We shall have to find others—even if we train them ourselves. It is only the material for training that worries me. American young men of today are not overfond of painstaking work of this sort."
I knew instantly what he meant. As a nation we are made up of "shortcut" experts. Perseverance, patience, a tedious attention to uninteresting detail, have seemingly but little appeal to the average young man who is looking forward to a real career for himself. To be an executive—no matter by what name or title—and in as short a time as is humanly possible is apparently the only object that he sees ahead of him. A laudable ambition to be sure. But one shudders at the mere thought of a land which should be composed entirely of executives and wishes that we might develop more definitely a class of artisan workers, such as came to us forty, thirty, even twenty-five years ago.
The oldest of these men—the man with thirty Macy years to his credit—was chasing a hunting scene upon a great glass bowl as I bent over his desk. It was more than artisanship, that task; it was artistry. A real work of real art even though at the moment these elaborate cut-glass designs have lost a little in public favor. In their own time and order they will come back again, however. And the workmanship that made them possible will be restored to its own former high favor.
But even today there are large demands in Macy's for precisely this sort of thing. And glass grinding and engraving—which runs all the way from the making of prescription lenses for spectacles or for milady's lorgnons up to the cutting of an entire dinner service of the most exquisitely patterned glass or repairs to the bowl or pitcher that Bridget or Selma has so carelessly broken—is the chief factor of a shop that handles, as other parts of its day's job, jewelry and watch repairs, electro-plating of gold, copper, silver, nickel, the printing or engraving or stamping of stationery of every sort, to say nothing of leather goods of every kind and description and a thousand lesser and highly individual jobs, such as the regilding of a mirror or the transformation of an ancient whale-oil lamp into a modern incandescent one. It is small wonder that as a minimum seventy-five men are constantly employed in this shop; more, as the exigencies of this season or of that may demand them.