1922: Businessman Sylvanus F. Bowser

Note: Here is a man anyone would have thought an unfortunate soul with no hope and no chance — yet he succeeded despite everything.

From a 1922 issue of The American Magazine:

A Story That Makes You Take a New Grip on Yourself

If Sylvanus Bowser, with less than four months of schooling in his whole life, and with sickness, poverty, and hardship to contend with, could build up a business which girdles the earth, what decent excuse can the rest of us give for failure?

by John Kidder Rhodes

The teacher of a little country Sunday-school in Indiana, in the early sixties, offered a Bible as a prize for the pupil who was able to commit to memory the largest number of verses from the Scriptures within a given time. One of the pupils was a thirteen-year-old boy, timid and awkward, who lived with his parents in the neighborhood.

He never had been to school. . . . He did not know how to read. . . . He knew only the letters of the alphabet. . . . But he determined to win that Bible!

1922: Cattleman Murdo Mackenzie

Notes:

1) A man who needs a gun is no man
2) No effort is ever wasted, even if unpaid
3) Knowledge can be spent repeatedly, money just once
4) Circumstances can be better than any “life plan”
(For numbers two and four, also see: 1922: General Manager Edward M. Skinner)

From a 1922 issue of The American Magazine:

Do You Use Fair Play or “Gun Play” to Gain Your Ends?

In the heyday of Western “bad men” Murdo Mackenzie refused to carry a gun. The pistol toters killed themselves off; but Mackenzie, by straight thinking and fair dealing, lived to become one of the world’s cattle kings

by Neil M. Clark

The very name, Murdo Mackenzie, carries a hint of something interesting. No one needs to be told that the name comes from Scotland. It is as Scotch as the heather in the Highlands, where Murdo Mackenzie was born.

That was in 1850; and in the seventy-two years which have passed since that time Mackenzie has lived an extraordinary life.

1922: General Manager Edward M. Skinner

From a 1922 issue of The American Magazine:

Can You Size Folks Up As This Man Does?

Experiences and ideas of one of the shrewdest credit men in the United States

by Allen Sinsheimer

I was talking with Edward M. Skinner, of Chicago, who is recognized as one of the best credit men in the country — a man with a positive genius for sizing up the human beings with whom he comes in contact. And I had asked him how he could determine, in the course of a short conversation with a person, a stranger, whether or not that person was honest.

1922: NCR General Manager Jack Barringer

From a 1922 issue of The American Magazine:

(Google scanner clamps block some text, above.)

$1,250 for a Shine

But “Jack” Barringer made that shoe-blacking episode a million dollars to the National Cash Register Company, of which he is General Manager

by B. C. Forbes

What would you think of a man who would order a shoe-shine costing $1,250 of his company’s money? You would feel like calling him crazy. Yet that is exactly what a certain big executive did. And he was not crazy; for that shoe-shine did more than any other one thing to enable his company to sell more goods last year than in any pre-war year in its long history.

1922: Businessman A. Elmo Hudson

From a 1922 issue of The American Magazine:

A Bedfast Executive Whose Office Never Closes

Completely paralyzed from the waist down, unable to sit propped up in bed for any length of time, A. Elmo Hudson has overcome his physical handicaps to such an extent that he is one of the most “active” business men in Kansas City.

When customers call the Santa Fé Transfer Company in Kansas City, only a very small percentage of them realize that the cheerful voice taking their orders belongs to a man who is speaking into the telephone from his bed.