Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 92, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 April 1910 — COULD NOT GET RID OF BOXES. [ARTICLE]

COULD NOT GET RID OF BOXES.

They Were So Large No One Would Move Them. Once there was a man -who - came irto possession of some boxes. Nothing funny in that? Of course not. Anybody who had a chance to get some nice packing boxes would have been as glad as he was. “They’re big ones,” said the friend who gave them to him, and the recipient laughed happily. “The bigger the better,” he said, merrily. “I’ll send down to the place and get ’em this afternoon." That afternoon he approached a move wagon man and told him he had fourteen packing cases to be moved, and asked what he would charge. The move wagon man took a stub of pencil and made a calculation based upon usual charges of 25 cents a box. and finally agreed to move them for $2.50 as a whole. The box owner then went home and waited for his boxes. At last he called up the place where the boxes had been stored. The owner of the storeroom was angry. He more than intimated that the boxes were in the way and suggested that the owner come down and take them away. The move wagon man had come, seen and departed, shaking his head. The owner then went down to straighten out the matter. He found that the boxes were Indeed large. One was a little fellow eight feet square, while the others could have held a couple of square pianos apiece. They were foreign-built boxes, dovetailed and firm, and built with screws and cleats and plainly intended to remain boxes.

“This ain’t no lumber yard,” suggested the man who had the storeroom. “You’ll have to get ’em out this afternoon. I need the room.” Then the owner worked the telephone frantically in search of a purchaser., By 4 o’clock three people had called, looked at the boxes and taken fright. They were very large boxes. By 5 o’clock the owner was trying to give the boxes away. One man agreed to \ake them,"and he was happy until the man called up and. remarking that he .didn’t bargain to remove houses, threw up the job. At 6 o’clock he nearly had a fight with the owner of the storeroom, and It ended in the box owner hiring a negro at 50 cents an hour to make lumber of the boxes, and hiring a move wagon at $2 a trip to haul the lumber away. When he came to analyze the situation he found he had bought $3 worth of second-hand, nail-studded lumber of odd sizes, and had paid $4.50 for it.