- cured interesting material for an article which the editor
entitled, "Little Wants of a Big City." A selection from the article follows:
Anybody can be a clerk or a clergyman or a bank president
or a teamster. It takes more individuality to strike out in a
career like that of the man who works but one week in the
year. This man is Santa Claus. His head is covered with a
mass of snow-white hair. It falls down over his venerable
shoulders and mingles with his equally white beard. The latter
falls far down his chest and the old gentleman looks for
all the world like the pictures of Santa Claus. Every holiday
season he can be found working in some store, posing as the
holiday saint, rattling shiny toys before the fascinated gaze
of New York's million children.
Fifty-one weeks in the year he works not at all, and how he subsists and has enough money to buy his little red drinks no man can tell.
The line-up man is a product of New York and of nowhere else. He belongs to a clan of agile, sinewy legged brethren who infest back yards, and his business is to shin up the poles from which are suspended innumerable clotheslines, to fix up frayed out lines, tie on new ropes and get the courtyard rigging into shipshape condition against the Monday wash. He will climb the highest pole in Harlem without the aid of a net and fix your ropes for 25 cents.
"Lady, it is decidedly unsafe to trundle your baby about in that rickety carriage," is the greeting of the vender of rubber tires for perambulators.
After convincing a startled mother that she has been carelessly subjecting her child to terrible danger from capsizing, the crafty salesman swoops down upon the carriage, tacks on a set of new tires, tinkers up a rickety spoke, slaps a cracked hub together and goes on his way with a merry quarter in his jeans. It's another odd job.
Take the industrious sellers of keys. They come up to your tenement home, knock at the door and ask whether you need a new key to the chateau. If you have just lost your last key the keyhole genius stoops down, twiddles around with a blank key and some beeswax, files a couple of notches in the blank, and presto—you have a shining new key all for ten cents. A locksmith would take two days and charge you a quarter.
