* Struck through, perhaps due to its similarity in pronunciation to “Coarse hair”
9 THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS
1. It was a sizeable investment. We can only guess at the identity of the mysterious benefactor. I am inclined to believe it was J.P. Morgen who twenty years earlier had been suspected of having paid Jonathan’s legal fees in the lawsuit filed to free him from his indentureship with the Grund Traveling Circus and Wild West Show. In the interim, Morgen had significantly increased his financial holdings through shrewd wartime investments and successful stock and bond trades. There was another reason why the Arkansas businessman might have been a prime candidate to loan start-up capital for Dandy-de-odor-o, Inc.: Morgen suffered from a severe form of bromhidrosis that left him virtually friendless, often emptied corporate board rooms, and on one occasion cleared out a well-attended stockholders’ meeting, the hall subsequently requiring fumigation. A strong affinity by Morgen for such a venture would not be an implausibility. One wonders at the same time if Jonathan’s battlefield inspiration for Dandy-de-odor-o might have been antedated by a hospital visit from the aromatic businessman on the eve of the boy’s scheduled operation, a half-forgotten memory later revived — as olfactory memories often are — as fresh and aromatic as the day of their birth.
For a different opinion, consider Glover and Furman’s theory that the money for Jonathan’s start-up company came from his academic mentor Andrew Bloor. They posit that Bloor may very well have inherited some of his uncle’s estate following the old man’s death during the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918. There would be some truth to this if Bloor’s uncle Cleve MacDougal had, in fact, passed away. (The Spanish Flu was notorious for sparing the very young and the very old, a phenomenon that baffles scientists to this day.) Apparently, neither Glover nor Furman read the Carpentertown (Arkansas) Gazette’s retraction of MacDougal’s obituary. I include it here.
Correction.
We regret to note that the obituary for Mr. Cleve MacDougal that ran in yesterday’s paper was published prematurely. Mr. MacDougal is not dead, nor has he ever been dead. He was taken ill with the flu but he is most decidedly on the mend. He wishes everyone to know that he should be up to entertaining visitors by the end of the week and that his sizeable estate is still “up for grabs,” so all potential heirs are admonished to be on their best behavior.
2. Jonathan hired him on the spot. Chief chemist Hiram Diles would remain employed for the next forty-two years in Dandy-de-odor-o’s Research and Development Division.
3. Jonathan hired him half way through the interview. Chief financial officer Charleton Caldwell would remain a part of the Dandy-de-odor-o corporate family for the next forty-five years.
4. Jonathan hired him after several months of harassing phone calls, an extensive letter-writing campaign and at least one episode of drunken stalking. Ironically, it was Harlan Davison who was to become Jonathan’s most trusted lieutenant and, in time, his best friend. In his letter to his sister Shirley Watkins, written several months after he was brought on board (19 November 1922, HD), Davison states as much. An excerpt follows.
“After several months of harassing phone calls, an extensive letter-writing campaign (please thank all your third graders for their efforts) and at least one sad episode I will not go into here, I am once more a soldier in the army of the employed. I am quickly earning Mr. Blashette’s trust and am growing more and more confident that the company will be my home for many years to come. You need worry no longer about your wayward, rudderless younger brother”
5. Davison was related to Carry Nation. Griswold Lanham, “Harlan Davison: the Three-legged Business Marvel’s Right-Hand Man,” Journal of Entrepreneurial History 13 (1990): 25–42. In an amazing historical coincidence, Davison was also related to Reid Lowell, the only saloon owner who succeeded in a counter-offensive against Mrs. Nation’s reign of terror. While Nation was off on a road trip, taking her whacks at a new crop of demon “rummy houses,” Lowell visited Nation’s own home and chopped into fine kindling most of its Adirondack porch and lawn furniture with his own sharply whetted hatchet. Pinned to the resultant wreckage was a note that read, “Like you, Mrs. Nation, I did this stone sober. Unlike you, I shall now go and have myself a pint to celebrate.”
6. Bardock joined the firm in the summer. The name of Jonathan’s new accountant was originally Joseph Berdache. When Joseph was six years old, his father was informed by a family friend, a linguist, that Berdache literally meant, “homosexual, cross-dressing American Indian male.” A legal name change was immediately petitioned for all members of the family. Ellery Reinhold, The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o, the Little Company That Could…and Then Did (New York: Christopher Street Press, 1972), 99.
7. “Today I introduced Jonny to Winny. It was an instant match.” Davison had known artist Winny Wieseler since the two were kids. His journal entry for the day goes on to say:
“I hardly needed to say a word beyond the briefest of introductions. She looked at him and he looked at her and she looked at his third leg and he looked down at his third leg and then up at her and she met his eyes with hers and smiled one of those big goofy Winny smiles and I knew instantly that he knew that this wasn’t going to be a problem and he smiled with obvious relief — one of those crooked, face-scrunching Jonathan Blashette grins and then they fell into a conversation originally about beer nuts which I had put out in a bowl on the table but then about everything under the sun and the conversation continued through the afternoon and into the evening and perhaps even well into the wee small hours of the morning (I excused myself after an hour or so). It is an amazing and wonderful thing to see two dear friends hit it off so easily and so completely. I will be patting myself on the back over this one for months to come.”
Davison’s Diary, 6 January1923.
8. “I think she’s the finest girl I ever met…and she even likes jigsaw puzzles.” I bow to Lana Leggio, who, in her biography of Winny, Winsome Winny (Springfield, Massachusetts: Cohpannamo Books, 1958) evocatively describes the reasons for the attraction:
“Jonathan was quite taken with Winny. And it wasn’t simply the fact that she loved and accepted him as he was. He embraced everything about her — her commitment to progressive causes (woman’s rights, abolition of child labor, prison reform), her highly evolved taste in art and music, and her colorful, sustaining friendships. As Winny Wieseler evolved from shy country girl to a thoroughly modern force of nature, Jonathan Blashette eased back and enjoyed the ride, content to let this new and — he hoped — permanent love of his life navigate the couple’s destiny — a destiny lovingly shared, its catapult sprung from the shimmy and shake of those wild, reckless, wacky, and feckless 1920s.
Nothing sums up better the winning wit and whimsy of Winny Wieseler than her parody of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem ‘My Candle Burns.’
My ice cream cone drips at both ends;
It will not last this heat;
But ah my tummy, and oh my tongue—
It tastes so good to eat!”
9. Winny demonstrated her propensity for protest even as an outwardly timid and withdrawn young girl. Safe and secure behind the private fortress of her correspondence, Winny pulled no punches, as this, one of many angry letters she dashed off to those public figures who raised her youthful hackles, will attest.