You are now free-lancing and making designs for Mr. Kasten of the McClurg stationery department. You have a studio in the new Caxton building on Dearborn Street. You work all of one day and night and part of the next day on some drawings for Mr. Kasten. He comes to get them at four o’clock on the afternoon before Christmas. You tell him you haven’t eaten since the previous night.
He takes you and your drawings in a cab and stops at a saloon in the McVickar Theater building and buys you an egg nog. “Drink this,” he says. “It will put you on your feet until you reach home and can get dinner.” It is only a glass of milk and egg—and looks harmless. You get on the Madison Street horse-car, and take a seat up front. There is straw on the floor to keep your feet warm. You promptly go to sleep. The car bumps across some tracks and you wake long enough to know your stop is only two blocks away. In getting off the car the straw tangles your feet and you seem to be falling over everyone. The sidewalk is not wide enough for you. This being a new section, the planks are a foot or more above the ground. You walk in the road.
In these early Nineties no cash is needed to buy a printing outfit, just an agreement to pay a monthly installment. You buy a Golding press, a type-stand, a small stone and a few cases of Caslon and an English text. You are probably itching to play a little with printing. You do not find time to do more than lay the type. A letter comes from your wife’s sister in South Dakota. It states that a neighbor’s son or brother, or some near relative, is in Chicago, that he is interested in art, and it asks will you look him up. He is a bookkeeper and cashier in a ground-floor real-estate office at the corner of Clark and Dearborn. His name is Fred Goudy. He wants to get into the printing business, in a small way. You tell him of your small outfit and that he can have it and the benefit of payments made if he will assume future installments. He agrees.
THE GAY NINETIES
Chicago a phoenix city risen from the ashes of its great fire; downtown business buildings two, three and four stories high, more of former than latter, few a little higher, elevators a rare luxury; across the river many one-story stores and shops with signs in large lettering, pioneer style, on their false fronts; streets paved with granite blocks echo to the rumble of iron-tired wheels and the clank of iron-shod hoofs; a continuous singing of steel car-cables on State Street and Wabash Avenue; horse-drawn cross-town cars thickly carpeted with straw in winter; outlying residential streets paved with cedar blocks; avenues boasting asphalt. Bonneted women with wasp waists, leg o’ mutton sleeves, bustles, their lifted, otherwise dust-collecting, skirts revealing high-buttoned shoes and gaily-striped stockings; men in brown derbies, short jackets, high-buttoned waist-coats, tight trousers without cuffs and, when pressed, without pleats; shirts with Piccadilly collars and double-ended cuffs of detachable variety (story told of how a famous author’s hero, scion of an old house, when traveling by train, saw a beautiful young lady, undoubtedly of aristocratic birth, possibly royal, and wanting to meet her, love at first sight, object matrimony, first retires, with true blue-blood gentility, to wash-room and reverses cuffs. Romance, incident ruthlessly deleted by publisher, proves a best seller). Black walnut furniture upholstered in hair-cloth, pride of many a Victorian parlor, is gradually being replaced by golden oak and ash; painters’ studios, especially portrait variety, are hung with oriental rugs and littered with oriental screens and pottery. High bicycles, the Columbia with its little wheel behind and the Star with the little wheel in front, soon to disappear, are still popular. Low wheels, called “safeties,” are beginning to appear, occasionally ridden by women wearing bloomers. Pneumatic tires unknown.
Recognized now as a period of over-ornamentation and bad taste, the Nineties were nevertheless years of leisurely contacts, kindly advice and an appreciative pat on the back by an employer, and certainly a friendly bohemianism seldom known in the rush and drive of today.