Days in the Open

by Lathan A. Crandall

[Original]

“Forgotten it! Sometimes I can think of nothing else, and always something out of that boyhood is popping up even in the midst of my business undertakings.”

“Do you regret that you were not born in the city?”

“Regret it? Say, you are fooling. I wouldn’t trade the recollections of my boyhood on the farm for the best business block in this city.”

“But it can’t be worth anything to you in a business way. Life in the country doesn’t train one to manufacture gas engines.”

“Well, I’ve never stopped to consider what I owe in the matter of business success to my boyhood in the country, but now that you raise the question, I’m inclined to believe that it gave me pretty good training in some ways for the business in which I am engaged.

“When I came into this business at the age of twenty I was given a place in the shipping department at a salary of seven dollars per week. Now I am at the head of the firm, while many of the fellows who were with me in those days are still working on salary. You see I had the advantage of the city boys in being accustomed to work. On the farm I had my regular tasks. Why, when I was a little chap I wiped the dishes for mother, and when I grew older I had to keep the wood-box filled and go after the cows and pick up potatoes and—but you know what a lot of things there are to do on a farm where ‘a boy can help.

“Now that I think of it, I imagine that I was learning application, industry and self-control—big assets in business. The city-bred boy has never had that schooling. He has not been trained to hold himself to hard and continued effort. It is not his fault, and I do not know that his parents are to be blamed. I have two boys of my own born in the city, and one of the questions which perplexes me most is how to provide them with regular tasks that shall develop their sense of responsibility and cultivate habits of industry and application. Although I could afford to have a man to take care of the lawn and attend to the furnace, I have the boys do this work for their own sakes. It is good as far as it goes, but I am afraid it does not go far enough. They have too much time to spend in doing nothing, and habits of idleness formed in boyhood are likely to stick when one comes to manhood. I do not believe in manufacturing tasks or setting them at work which is not real, for boys are keen observers and you cannot fool them into believing that they are doing something worth while when compelled to take wood from one corner of the cellar and pile it in another corner, and then shift it back again. The man who devises some way of supplying real tasks for the boys of the well-to-do city families will be a public benefactor.

“Now, that you have started the discussion of this subject, how about the physical health and strength that I brought from my country life to the work which I am doing? Of course, we have our sleeping porches and playgrounds and medical inspection in the public schools, and are doing what we can to build sound bodies for our city children, but I suspect that the out-door life of the country boy and his regular exercise and plain food furnish a far and away better physical preparation for the strenuous work of business life than anything we are able to devise for our children in the city.