Kalamazoo has a Commercial Club. What place hasn't? And the Commercial Club has issued a booklet. What Commercial Club hasn't? This one bears the somewhat fanciful title "The Lure of Kalamazoo."
"The Lure of Kalamazoo" is written in that peculiarly chaste style characteristic of Chamber of Commerce "literature"—a style comparable only with that of railway folders and summer hotel booklets. It is the "Here-all-nature-seems-to-be-rejoicing" school. Let me present an extract:
Kalamazoo is peculiarly a city of homes—homes varying in cost from the modest cottage of the laborer to the palatial house of the wealthy manufacturer.
The only place in which the man who wrote that slipped up, was in referring to the wealthy manufacturer's "house." Obviously the word called for there is "mansion." However, in justice to this man, and to Kalamazoo, I ought to add that the town seemed to be rather free from "mansions." That is one of the pleasantest things about it. It is just a pretty, unpretentious place. Perhaps he actually meant to say "house," but I doubt it. I think he missed a trick. I think he failed to get the right word, just as if he had been writing about brooks, and had forgotten to say "purling."
But if I saw no "mansions," I did see one building in Kalamazoo the architecture of which was distinguished. That was the building of the Western Michigan Normal School—a long, low structure of classical design, with three fine porticos.
Having a Commercial Club, Kalamazoo quite naturally has a "slogan," too. (A "slogan," by the way, is the war cry or gathering cry of a Highland clan—but that makes no difference to a Commercial Club.) It is: "In Kalamazoo We Do."
This battle cry "did" very well up to less than a year ago; then it suddenly began to languish. There was a company in Kalamazoo called the Michigan Buggy Company, and this company had a very sour failure last year, their figures varying from fact to the extent of about a million and a half dollars. Not satisfied with dummy accounts and padded statements, they had, also, what was called a "velvet pay roll." And, when it all blew up, the whole of Michigan was shaken by the shock. Since that time, I am informed, the "slogan" "In Kalamazoo We Do" has not been in high favor.
She was saying to herself (and, unconsciously, to us, through the window): "If I had played that hand, I never should have done it that way!"