“If it’s your scheme,” says I, “to have him make the pickles some place else, they’ll still be his pickles. And that will queer them. For everybody who knows him will take it for granted that the pickles aren’t clean.”
“But, Jerry, they will be clean. For we’ll watch him like a hawk.”
“It won’t work,” I shook my head.
The leader laughed. And right away I saw that he had something up his sleeve.
“Say, Jerry,” says he, “did you ever notice the picture of Aunt Jemima on the pancake flour?”
“Sure thing. But what’s Aunt Jemima got to do with our pickles?”
“We all know that Aunt Jemima is just a made-up character. The same as the Cream of Wheat man. As I understand it, such characters are used in advertising and selling to give the product a sort of personal touch. Just to look at the big grin on Aunt Jemima’s face convinces us that her pancakes are good. So we are led to think of good pancakes instead of flour. Which is all to the point that if we put this ‘Aunt Jemima’ scheme to work in our own business our customers will be led to think of good pickles, and the question of who made them may never come up.”
That kid! If he isn’t the limit. The schemes in his head are thicker than mice in a corncrib. If something bobs up to cripple one scheme he drags out another. And if that one gets paralysis, or the chilblains, he has still a third. To tell the truth, this ‘Aunt Jemima’ stuff was all Greek to me. But what of that? If he had the nerve to tackle it, and take the responsibility, certainly I ought to be willing to stand back of him and help him.
The decision having thus been arrived at that Aunt Jemima was going to do some pickling as well as pancaking, we shook hands on it, for good luck, and then set out to buy a train-load of cucumbers.