A few months later, when you have just turned into your eighteenth year and have saved sixty dollars, three twenty-dollar gold pieces, it is time to return to Chicago. You tell Mr. Newett. He wishes you well and says that if you care to remain with Iron Ore he will take you into partnership when you are twenty. This is a big temptation. You admire and like your boss. He is a grand person—your idol. Saying goodbye involves a wrench.

You are now back with R-M staying half an hour at night and getting to work a half hour earlier in the morning and all is well with the world.

At the time of your first visit to Chicago, line photo-engraving was not even a whisper, and halftones were not even dreams. On your second visit, pen drawings are beginning to receive direct reproduction.

Folding machines are unknown; and in a large loft, at long tables, dozens upon dozens of girls are hand-folding railroad timetables. This loft is on a level with the designing department. Between the two there is a brick wall through which, about two feet up from the floor, has been cut an opening in which there is a heavy, tin-covered sliding door. When you take 14 × 22 metal plates down to the foundry to be routed—by someone else, for you don’t like machines—you pass through this loft, between the girl-adorned tables. You, in turn, are adorned with the side-whiskers known as mutton-chops—trying to look older than your years. Also, in accord with the custom of the times, you wear tight-fitting pants. One day, in returning from the foundry with a metal plate on your shoulder, you pull back the sliding door and when you lift one leg to step through the opening the pants rip where the cloth is tightest. On another occasion when again carrying a plate on your shoulder your jacket pocket catches on a key at the end of a paper-cutter shaft and the shoddy that had once proved so disastrous in your pants now probably averts a serious accident.

Web presses and automatic feeders are also absent. In the basement at Rand McNally’s there is a battery of drum-cylinders printing James S. Kirk “American Family Soap” wrappers. The stock is thin, red-glazed paper, and the sheets a double 24 × 36, or perhaps even larger. You marvel at the skill with which boys do the feeding; but even greater is your wonder at the hand-jogging and cutting of these slippery and flimsy sheets.

Invitations are sent out for an inspection of the composing-room of the Chicago Herald, now newly equipped throughout with Hamilton labor-saving furniture. You attend. Compositors are sticking type for the next edition. A little later the Herald places on display its first web press. This showing is in a ground-floor room, a step or two down from the street, next door to the Chicago Opera House, where Kiralphry’s Black Crook is now playing and Eddie Foy is putting audiences in “stitches.” The press is a single unit standing in a shallow pit surrounded by a brass rail.

Comes now the winter. It is a Saturday. You are at the home of your boss. He has invited you to spend the afternoon learning how to paint. His easel is set up in the basement dining room. He is talking to you about religion, gravely concerned at learning that you sometimes attend the Universalist church. He believes you to be a heathen and suggests that you become converted and join a fundamentalist church—says that as long as you remain outside the fold and thus are not a Christian he cannot be interested in helping you become an artist.

The dear man! He wants so much to save your soul. Meanwhile, his good wife is laying the table for their evening meal. Her smile is motherly. Maybe she has guessed you were counting the plates. Pleasant odors come from the kitchen. Our gracious host brings your coat, helps you put it on, hands you your hat, opens the door and you step out into a Chicago snowstorm.

At this point the script calls for slow music and heart-rending sobs—another Kate Claxton in the Two Orphans. Also for melodrama! This is a beautiful snowstorm. The evening is mild and the flakes are big. They sail lazily through the amber light of the street lamps, feather the bare branches of trees that print a fantastic pattern against the red-brick housefronts. The drifts must be at least an inch deep. And tomorrow ... tomorrow, you will, as always happens on Sunday, go to a restaurant on Clark Street where you will be served two pork tenderloins, flanked by a mound of mashed potatoes topped with gravy, and one other vegetable, and supplemented by bread and butter and a cup of coffee—all for twenty cents. Joy bells ringing!

A couple of weeks later you are standing at a case in the printing plant of Knight & Leonard. Mr. Leonard happens to be passing. He stops and glances at your galley, type arrangement for a catalog cover. He is interested and asks where you learned job composition. In one graphically condensed paragraph, dramatically composed, for it has been prepared in advance in anticipation of this much wished-for opportunity, you tell the story of your life—and make a momentous proposition.

The next morning you are seated at a flat-top desk in the second-floor office. You have your drawing material and are designing a new booklet cover for the stationery department of A. C. McClurg. It is understood that when orders for drawing fail you will fill in by setting type.

Now you are, at nineteen, a full-fledged designer and working at a window opposite Spalding’s. On playing days you watch Pop Anson and his be-whiskered team enter a barge and depart for the ball park.

One day a young man appears at K & L’s with proofs of halftone engravings. He has been with the Mathews Northrup Press in Buffalo, where he had learned the process. He is now starting an engraving plant in Chicago. K & L print some specimen sheets on coated paper. These are probably the first halftones ever engraved in Chicago, also the first printing of halftones. K & L are Chicago’s leading commercial printers, quality considered. Mr. Knight is a retired Board of Trade operator. Mr. Leonard is the practical printer. He is also the father of Lillian Russell. Once, when she is appearing in Chicago, Miss Russell visits at the office. You are thrilled.

A man, trained in Germany, grinds ink for K & L. He is located on the floor above the office. You occasionally visit him. He gives you much good advice. The Inter Ocean, located on the next corner, installs a color press. The K & L ink expert helps get out the first edition.

For two years or more you occupy that desk and never again see the composing room. During this period, while receiving twenty-four dollars a week, you marry that young lady of your ten-year-old romance.The J. M. W. Jeffery Co., show printers, is turning out some swell posters designed by Will Crane. They are printed from wood-blocks and are wonders. An artist by the name of Frank Getty is designing labels in the Chicago sales-office of the Crump Label Company. They are a glorious departure from the conventional truck of the label lithographers.

Joe Lyendecker is designing covers in color for paper-bound novels. They are gorgeous. There are no art magazines or other publications helpful to designers. You, like others, have a scrap-book made up of booklet covers, cards and other forms of advertising. A designer by the name of Bridwell is doing some thrilling work for Mathews Northrup in Buffalo, a concern that is setting a stiff pace for other railroad printers. Abbey, Parsons, Smedley, Frost and Pennell, and Charles Graham in Harper’s Weekly, are models for all illustrators.You are now free-lancing and making designs for Mr. Kasten of the McClurg stationery department. You have a studio in the new Caxton building on Dearborn Street. You work all of one day and night and part of the next day on some drawings for Mr. Kasten. He comes to get them at four o’clock on the afternoon before Christmas. You tell him you haven’t eaten since the previous night.

He takes you and your drawings in a cab and stops at a saloon in the McVickar Theater building and buys you an egg nog. “Drink this,” he says. “It will put you on your feet until you reach home and can get dinner.” It is only a glass of milk and egg—and looks harmless. You get on the Madison Street horse-car, and take a seat up front. There is straw on the floor to keep your feet warm. You promptly go to sleep. The car bumps across some tracks and you wake long enough to know your stop is only two blocks away. In getting off the car the straw tangles your feet and you seem to be falling over everyone. The sidewalk is not wide enough for you. This being a new section, the planks are a foot or more above the ground. You walk in the road.

In these early Nineties no cash is needed to buy a printing outfit, just an agreement to pay a monthly installment. You buy a Golding press, a type-stand, a small stone and a few cases of Caslon and an English text. You are probably itching to play a little with printing. You do not find time to do more than lay the type. A letter comes from your wife’s sister in South Dakota. It states that a neighbor’s son or brother, or some near relative, is in Chicago, that he is interested in art, and it asks will you look him up. He is a bookkeeper and cashier in a ground-floor real-estate office at the corner of Clark and Dearborn. His name is Fred Goudy. He wants to get into the printing business, in a small way. You tell him of your small outfit and that he can have it and the benefit of payments made if he will assume future installments. He agrees.