🎧 327: For a while . . .

12

In Which Coarse Goods Help Herb and Lorna Survive the Great Depression

FOR A WHILE, the nation, the Studebaker Corporation, and Herb and Lorna were doing well. Herb sold Studebakers with the zeal of a fanatic. Because he loved selling for itself, it was a far stronger affection than the money he made could have inspired; it was the kind of affection that people develop for leisure activities, for following a basketball team, tending a garden, or trying to turn a lawn into the lush carpet pictured on bags of grass seed. Added to his love of selling was his fondness for Studebakers, which grew and grew. He couldn’t seem to get enough of them, know enough about them. In idle hours at the showroom, he read and reread the sales brochures, and he even read all the technical and repair manuals. He knew the cars so well that other salesmen brought potential customers to him to have their questions answered and gladly gave Herb a part of their commissions when he helped with a sale — a small part, but they were glad to give it. It wasn’t unusual for one of the mechanics, even for Old Randolph himself on occasion, to come in from the shop wearing a puzzled look and holding some doohickey or other.
     “Say, Herb,” he might say, “what the Sam Hill is this thingumabob supposed to do? God knows I never saw the like of it before now.”
     “This?” Herb might say, giving the part the once-over. “This gadget is part of the free-wheeling assembly. Brand new. We’ve only sold two cars with it so far. You don’t have one in for repair already, do you?”
     “To tell the truth, I’m not sure if it’s broke or not. Just makes a funny kind of noise.”
     “Whirrrr-ticka whirrrr-ticka?”
     “Yep, that’s it. Kind of a whirrrr-ticka whirrrr-ticka.”
     “That’s normal,” said Herb. “Button her back up.”
     It was at this time, when Herb had some money to spare, that tinkering for the sake of tinkering became his consuming leisure-time occupation. Earlier, the little projects he undertook had practical ends, however meandering may have been the routes he traveled to attain them. At this time, though, perhaps symptomatic of his infection by the attitudes endemic at the time — freedom, daring, aimless whoopee — Herb began undertaking more and more projects for the intricate work they promised, without much regard for the practicality of the result.
     He was at a critical point as a tinkerer. On the one hand, he had discovered how to increase the salutary distraction that comes from fiddling around, the distraction that, to take woodworking as an example, comes from cutting and sanding, producing a bunch of smooth rectangles and a nice pile of sawdust. On the other hand, however, Herb was losing sight of the need to justify such fiddling around by producing something that has enough utility to keep one from being considered a loony. (Just think of all the happy guys across America who are passing this moment making the chips fly with powerful and noisy routers. If asked by a neighbor, “What the hell are you up to, making all that racket?” they don’t have to be so frank as to say, “Oh, just fiddling around.” They justify the time they spend in their cozy workshops by making signs for the homes and cottages of their friends and neighbors, thereby demonstrating their generosity and, quite frequently, their reckless disregard for the plural and possessive forms of surnames.)
     Herb designed and built, to consider one example of his work during this period, an insert for kitchen drawers that, when the drawer was fully opened, raised itself from the drawer and presented the contents at an angle of about forty-five degrees. When one began pushing the drawer closed, the gadget began collapsing into the drawer again, its rate of collapse matching the rate at which one closed the drawer. Hour after happy hour went into the design, the construction of prototypes, the modification of the prototypes. They were hours when Herb whistled while he worked. Lorna, who loved his projects, sometimes sat beside him and talked or helped while Ella played with scraps and rejects, keeping always close beside her a Raggedy Andy doll with which she had fallen in love. Lorna took pleasure from Herb’s pleasure in the work, and she admired his ingenuity, his mechanical cleverness, which she considered the equal, in its way, of the work of the anonymous coarse-goods animator. These were wonderful, contented, worry-free hours, but the product of those hours was, May recalled, almost useless:

     Well, that folding-drawer gadget was an absolute scream. Herb outfitted our entire kitchen with them! Every time you opened a drawer, this handsome — and they were very handsome — wooden whatchamacallit would riiiise up — very gracefully — and tillllt forward — and dump everything on your feet. But it was a beautiful thing to look at, just the same, and it worked like a charm. It didn’t do anything that anyone in her right mind would want a gadget to do, but it did it remarkably well.

     It was also at this time that Herb began leaving projects half-finished. The most pleasant part of the work ended, for him, when he was going to have to turn out a product. Often, Lorna would step in at this point and finish up, while Herb went on to something else. She was curious to see how the project would turn out, and she loved adding her work to Herb’s.

In Topical Guide 327, Mark Dorset considers Studebakers: Engineering and Innovation and Projects: Practical and Impractical from this episode.

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