instead of waiting until it reached the fried mush situation. I did not hesitate to
ask because Brian Smith Associates were prosperous.
I was no longer secretary-bookkeeper of our family firm; I had relinquished that
status when Nelson, Betty Lou, and our business office had all moved out of the
house together, two years earlier. No friction between us, not at all, and I had
urged them to stay. But they wanted to be on their own and I understood that. Brian
Smith Associates took an office near 31 st and Paseo, second floor, over a
haberdashery, a location near the Troost Avenue Bank and the PO substation. It was a
good neighbourhood for an office outside the downtown financial district. The Nelson
Johnsons had their first home of their own about a hundred yards south on a side
street, South Paseo Place.
This meant that Betty Lou could handle the records and go to the bank and pick up
the mail, while still taking care of her two children, i.e., the back room of the
company’s `palatial suite’ was converted into a day nursery.
Yet I was only twenty minutes away and could relieve her if she needed me, straight
down 3ist by trolley car, good neighbourhoods st both ends, where I need not feel
timid even after dark.
We continued this way until 1915, when Brian and Nelson hired a downy duckling fresh
out of Spaulding’s Commercial College, Anita Boles. Betty Lou and I continued to
keep an eye on the books and one of us would be in the office if both men were out
of town, as this child still believed in Santa Claus. But her typing was fast and
accurate. (We had a new Remington now. I kept my old Oliver at home – a loyal
friend, grown feeble.)
So I continued to know our financial position. It was good and got steadily better.
Brian accepted points in lieu of full fee several times in the years 1906-1913; five
of these enterprises had made money and three had paid quite well: a reopened zinc
mine near Joplin, a silver mine near Denver, and a gold mine in Montana… and
Briney was just cynical enough that he paid freely under the table to keep a close
check on both the silver mine and the gold mine. He told me once, `You can’t stop
high-grading. Even your dear old grandmother can be tempted when gold ore gets so
heavy that you can simply pick it up and know that it is loaded. But you can making
stealing difficult if you are willing to pay for service.’
By 1911 there was plenty of money coming in, but I could not tell where much of it
was going – and I would not ask Briney. It came in, it showed in the books; Nelson
drew out some of it, Brian drew out more of it. Some of it wound up in my and in
Betty Lou’s hands to support our two households. But that did not account for all of
it. The firm’s cheque account was simply an aid to bookkeeping, a means to pay Anita
and to pay by cheque other expenses; it was never allowed to grow larger than was
needed for those purposes.
It was many years before I learned more than that.
On 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, Serbia, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire was assassinated. He was Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an otherwise useless piece
of royalty, and to this day I have never been able to understand why this event
could cause Germany to invade Belgium a month later. I read carefully all the
newspapers at the time; I studied all the books I could lay hands on since, and I
still can’t see it. Sheer folly. I can see why, by a sort of insane logic, the
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Kaiser would attack his first cousin in St Petersburg – a network of
`suicide-compact’ alliances.
But why invade Belgium?
Yes, yes, to get at France. But why get at France at all? Why go out of your way to
start wars on two fronts? And why do it through Belgium when that would drag in the