CHAPTER III
THE MONEY-MAKING MACHINE, I
By the time young James was seven or eight, his father’s job at the Lamont and Coate soap establishment had become twofold. He manufactured the soap by the primitive, grimy process of steam-mixing wood ashes with discarded animal fats and he also acted as salesman. Once in a while, young James went along with his father on the selling expeditions. Chathamites remembered the sight. The erect, clean-faced, good-looking little boy sat pridefully, they thought, beside his bearded, incongruously dignified father on a one-horse wagon, taking in with intent eyes his first impressions of the world beyond the shabby area of Elizabeth and Grand streets.
On these trips, the boy naturally learned something about the customs and ethics of commerce. One custom called for housewives to save the wood ashes from their own stoves and fireplaces in order to trade them for free bars of soap if other bars were purchased. Some women tried thriftily to get more free bars than were coming to them. Young James Couzens listened with sharp and alert interest to the bargaining that resulted—his first bit of education on how to become a businessman; and he noted especially his father’s satisfaction in not permitting a customer to get the better of him.
He learned also that people could be gullible. For example, some of his father’s customers insisted upon buying the soap according to brand names on the wrappers, preferring his “Electric” soap to his “Gladstone” soap, or vice versa. They were sure the one was much better than the other. But James knew that both brands came out of the same odoriferous batch.
2
When the boy was nine, a great event happened to his father. The elder Couzens became a soapmaker on his own, establishing the “Chatham Steam Soap Works, James J. Couzens, Prop.,” helped in this by an inheritance of about fifteen hundred dollars that unexpectedly fell to his wife on the death of her father.
Young James was well aware of the marked elation his father showed on becoming his own man, an independent entrepreneur, no less, in the great world of commerce and industry, a world in which the little “Chatham Steam Soap Works” was a substantial unit—at least in the eyes of its “prop.”
Bearded James Joseph Couzens, Senior, the new independent man, began to walk with greater dignity than before. But so also did young James Couzens, sans the “Joseph” and sans also the “Junior,” with ideas percolating in his well-shaped head, it may be assumed, of one day also becoming an independent man and heading some enterprise bigger and better even than his father’s “Chatham Steam Soap Works.”
This sudden economic rise in the world for the Couzenses of Chatham was accompanied by an appropriate growth in the size of the family. Two girls, Alice and Rosetta, were born. Later came two more boys, first Albert, then Homer. The fact of their existence naturally had an influence upon James, for a big-brother role now fell to him. Looked up to by four awed youngsters, he was now of lordlike stature in the family circle, his only rival for eminence being his father. Boyhood friends recalled, “He carried himself like a young lord.”1
3
When this “young lord” was going on thirteen, the elder Couzens became a dealer in coal and ice, along with soap. He also began to manufacture cement paving blocks—some of which were still in use in Chatham seventy years later. Indeed, James’ father had in fact become a real entrepreneur in Chatham, a status confirmed by his election as an elder of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church.
Quite early, James concluded that making money was synonymous with growing into manhood, an idea that his parents and the general cultural climate in Canada, as in the United States, encouraged. Before he was nine, he was earning money on his own—ten cents a week for pumping the organ at St. Andrew’s. When he wanted a saddle for the horse that pulled the soap wagon, his father told him to earn it. He should go out and sell soap, his father declared. This he did.2 When gas street-lamps were at last installed in the neighborhood, James scurried to get the job of lamp-tender. He obtained the plum and was paid one dollar a month from the town treasury for turning on four lamps each night and for keeping them clean.3 Of him, a town chronicler wrote: “In school, if a football or baseball were wanted, he organized the drive, persuaded the youngsters to chip in their dimes, nickels, and cents, and he made the ultimate thrifty dicker with the storekeeper.”4
4
His young mind obviously was much occupied with the power that went with money. To impress his sisters and brothers, he did an interesting and prophetic thing one day with his mother’s “Nightingale trunk.” Secretly he placed some coins inside it, then called the youngsters together, waved his hand, and cried, “Presto!”—revealing the coins. The trunk, he announced grandiosely to the astonished audience, had been converted by him into a “Money-making Machine.” Its secret was known only to him.5
5
He had, said his mother, “big dreams.”
Once he scolded her quite earnestly because he had been born in Canada: “I can never be King of England, but if I had been born in the United States, I could be President.”6
From another boy such a remark might have been set down as idle chatter. But his mother knew that he was serious.
She was often puzzled as to the source of such thoughts, and she would become hurt when such things occurred as a neighbor complaining that James “deliberately snubbed” her daughter. The girl had called hello to him from across the street, and he had ignored her. But he had an explanation. “If a girl wishes to speak to me, she should come across the street and do it properly.”7
One of his schoolmates recalled most vividly his conduct on the day that the pupils of his school, Central, were invited to attend an entertainment program at the McKeough School. “In came the Central pupils with Jim Couzens in the lead, and he proceeded to jump from one desk to another. His idea was to get for himself the choice of seats—and he took the most direct way.”8
6
For a time, he worked in his father’s soap factory. But the smell and mess of the place offended him. Then too, working there meant working for his father, which he detested. Already he wanted to be on his own—especially in relation to James Couzens, Senior.
One day, during the summer after he had completed primary school, when he was only twelve, he saw a want ad for a bookkeeper, placed in the local newspaper, the Chatham Planet, by a flour mill. A job like that would get him out of the soap works. So he applied for it, although, as he later admitted, he knew nothing about keeping books. Incredibly, he was given the position.
His father was not at all happy over this development. There was an emotional scene. But his father could give him no “good reason” why he should stay at the soap works if he could land the bookkeeping spot. So he took the job at the flour mill. He tackled it as though he really were qualified, and soon announced that bookkeeping was to be his career. Moreover, he said, he had no intention of going on to high school. He didn’t need that—a waste of time, he said.9
But, as might have been expected, he was soon to sustain some severe blows to his ego. One came when he lost the bookkeeping job when his employers finally concluded that he was too young. Then, after he decided to enter high school after all, he failed to pass the entrance examination. His father was irate and heatedly ordered him to get back to the soap works. The “punishment” proved a spur for him to “bone up” for another try at the entrance examination. This time he passed.
At high school he was more studious and tensely so than he had ever been before. He spent less time than his fellows in idling with other boys in Market Square. Instead, he put in more time with his books.10 He had not liked the taste of failure. It grated on his whole being. He “swore that it would never happen to him again.”11
In his mind, too, was an anxious need for erasing the stigma he felt was attached to his failure on the bookkeeping job. So, after two years at the high school, he enrolled for a two-year course in bookkeeping at the Canada Business College in Chatham, to be properly prepared for “the next time.” To pay his way while at this “college,” he worked as a newsbutcher on the Erie and Huron. The railroad “never had a better one,” recalled his superior, Bill Turtle. He was, said Turtle, a “hustler.”12
7
It was inconceivable that such a “hustler,” a youth whose anxious need for success gave him no rest, would long remain in the little town of Chatham.
He was bound to feel the lure of some bigger place—London, in Ontario; or Montreal, in Quebec; or even Detroit, only fifty miles away from Chatham. And just as inevitably, in view of his relationship with his father, he was destined to leave home as soon as he could. Only then could he—or his father and mother—have any real peace in the household: this was understood, though never expressed in so many words, by all three of them.
8
In 1889, when James Couzens was seventeen, a friend named Dickson went to Detroit, obtained a job with the Michigan Central Railroad, and wrote back that another job was to be had there. Young Couzens hurriedly packed up, and left at once to get it. But something went wrong. In a short time he found himself, unhappily, back home again.
A few months later—it was then 1890—he set off for Detroit again, and this time he stayed. On August 9, 1890, just as he was turning eighteen, he was hired as a car-checker by the Michigan Central in Detroit.
On the railroad his wage was forty dollars a month for a twelve-hour shift, seven days a week, and yet he was delighted. It was, he recalled, “great stuff” to be checking freight cars, even in weather so cold that the tacks which he carried in his mouth for affixing labels on the cars literally froze to his tongue. After each shift, he went to his room, in a place called the Amos House, feeling that he was “running the railroad.”13 Only when he had that kind of feeling was he ever content.
Most of all, however, he enjoyed the status of being on his own at last.
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