“Maybe it’s kind of immodest in me to show that around. And when I read a poem with such originality and swing, when I find a genu-ine vest-pocket masterpiece like this, then I realize that I’m not a poet at all, no matter how much my jingles may serve to jazz up the Cause of Health. My brain-children may teach sanitation and do their little part to save thousands of dear lives, but they aren’t literature, like what Chum Frink turns out. No, I guess I’m nothing but just a plain scientist in an office.
“Still, you’ll readily see how one of these efforts of mine, just by having a good laugh and a punch and some melody in it, does gild the pill and make careless folks stop spitting on the sidewalks, and get out into God’s great outdoors and get their lungs packed full of ozone and lead a real hairy-chested he-life. In fact you might care to look over the first number of a little semi-yearly magazine I’m just starting— I know for a fact that a number of newspaper editors are going to quote from it and so carry on the good work as well as boost my circulation.”
He handed to Martin a pamphlet entitled Pickerbaugh Pickings.
In verse and aphorism, Pickings recommended good health, good roads, good business, and the single standard of morality. Dr. Pickerbaugh backed up his injunctions with statistics as impressive as those the Reverend Ira Hinkley had once used at Digamma Pi. Martin was edified by an item which showed that among all families divorced in Ontario, Tennessee, and Southern Wyoming in 1912, the appalling number of fifty-three per cent. of the husbands drank at least one glass of whisky daily.
Before this warning had sunk in, Pickerbaugh snatched Pickings from him with a boyish, “Oh, you won’t want to read any more of my rot. You can look it over some future time. But this second volume of my clippings may perhaps interest you, just as a hint of what a fellow can do.”
While he considered the headlines in the scrapbook, Martin realized that Dr. Pickerbaugh was vastly better known than he had realized. He was exposed as the founder of the first Rotary Club in Iowa; superintendent of the Jonathan Edwards Congregational Sunday School of Nautilus; president of the Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club, of the West Side Bowling Club, and the 1912 Bull Moose and Roosevelt Club; organizer and cheer-leader of a Joint Picnic of the Woodmen, Moose, Elks, Masons, Oddfellows, Turnverein, Knights of Columbus, B’nai B’rith, and the Y. M. C. A.; and winner of the prizes both for reciting the largest number of Biblical texts and for dancing the best Irish jig at the Harvest Moon Soiree of the Jonathan Edwards Bible Class for the Grown-ups.
Martin read of him as addressing the Century Club of Nautilus on “A Yankee Doctor’s Trip Through Old Europe,” and the Mugford College Alumni Association on “Wanted: A Man-sized Feetball Coach for Old Mugford.” But outside of Nautilus as well, there were loud alarums of his presence.
He had spoken at the Toledo Chamber of Commerce Weekly Luncheon on “More Health— More Bank Clearings.” He had edified the National Interurban Trolley Council, meeting at Wichita, on “Health Maxims for Trolley Folks.” Seven thousand, six hundred Detroit automobile mechanics had listened to his observations on “Health First, Safety Second, and Booze Nowhere A-tall.” And in a great convention at Waterloo he had helped organize the first regiment in Iowa of the Anti-rum Minute Men.
The articles and editorials regarding him, in newspapers, house organs, and one rubber-goods periodical, were accompanied by photographs of himself, his buxom wife, and his eight bounding daughters, depicted in Canadian winter costumes among snow and icicles, in modest but easy athletic costumes, playing tennis in the backyard, and in costumes of no known genus whatever, frying bacon against a background of Northern Minnesota pines.
Martin felt strongly that he would like to get away and recover.