Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 119, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 May 1915 — HOW ONE MAN GOT HIS START [ARTICLE]

HOW ONE MAN GOT HIS START

Ambition to Be Author Not Successful, But it Served a Good Purpose in the End. "I got my start in life,” said a wealthy retired hardware dealer, "in a singular manner. “You might not think it, I having passed the major portion of my life in selling nails, padlocks, stoves and shovels, but in my early youth my great ambition was to be a writer, an author. I had no doubt whatever that that was what I was cut out for, and certainly I worked at it good and hard; but none of the publishers seemed to agree with me. As fast as I sent the things in to them (hey would send them back. “But that didn’t worry me. I Knew that sooner or later they would come to like what I wrote and buy it. What got my goat was the expense. I was a very ready writer and I wrote long pieces. The stamps 1 had to use to send these pieces out and get them back cost me a lot of money. "When I realized how much I was paying out for stamps I said to myself, ‘Humpf! I’ll save up that money for five years and then I’ll go to writing again.’ And for the next five years I did put aside regularly the amount that I would otherwise have spent for stamps, and you would be surprised it I should tell you how much it amounted to. But at the end of that time I did not again take up writing. "Just at that time .the senior partner in the hardware store in our town died and his heirs drew out all his interest in the firm. There was a chance for a man with a little capital to get into a good business. I had the capital, my accumulated stamp money, and I bought that interest in the hardware store. "From that time bn I was always too busy to write; but my great success in the hardware business you can clearly trace to my original ambition for authorship.”