Cheaper by the Dozen (14 page)

Dr. Harlow Shapley of Harvard gave Dad a hundred or more photographs of stars, nebulae, and solar eclipses. Dad hung these on the wall, near the floor. He explained that if they were up any higher, at the conventional level for pictures, the smaller children wouldn't be able to see them.

There was still some wall space left, and Dad had more than enough ideas to fill it. He tacked up a piece of cross-section graph paper, which was a thousand lines long and a thousand lines wide, and thus contained exactly a million little squares.

"You hear people talk a lot about a million," he said, "but not many people have ever seen exactly a million things at the same time. If a man has a million dollars, he has exactly as many dollars as there are little squares on that chart."

"Do you have a million dollars, Daddy?" Bill asked.

"No," said Dad a little ruefully. "I have a million children, instead. Somewhere along the line, a man has to choose between the two."

He painted diagrams in the dining room showing the difference between meters and feet, kilograms and pounds, liters and quarts. And he painted seventeen mysterious-looking symbols, representing each of the Therbligs, on a wall near the front door.

The Therbligs were discovered, or maybe a better word would be diagnosed, by Dad and Mother. Everybody has seventeen of them, they said, and the Therbligs can be used in such a way as to make life difficult or easy for their possessor.

A lazy man, Dad believed, always makes the best use of his Therbligs because he is too indolent to waste motions. Whenever Dad started to do a new motion study project at a factory, he'd always begin by announcing he wanted to photograph the motions of the laziest man on the job.

"The kind of fellow I want," he'd say, "is the fellow who is so lazy he won't even scratch himself.You must have one of those around some place. Every factory has them."

Dad named the Therbligs for himself-—Gilbreth spelled backwards, with a slight variation. They were the basic theorems of his business and resulted indirectly in such things as foot levers to open garbage cans, special chairs for factory workers, redesign of typewriters, and some aspects of the assembly line technique.

Using Therbligs, Dad had shown Regal Shoe Company clerks how they could take a customer's shoe off in seven seconds, and put it back on again and lace it up in twenty-two seconds.

Actually, a Therblig is a unit of motion or thought. Suppose a man goes into the bathroom to shave. We'll assume that his face is all lathered and he is ready to pick up his razor. He knows where the razor is, but first he must locate it with his eye. That is "search," the first Therblig. His eye finds it and comes to rest—that's "find," the second Therblig. Third comes "select," the process of sliding the razor prior to the fourth Therblig, "grasp." Fifth is "transport loaded," bringing the razor up to the face, and sixth is "position," getting the razor set on the face. There are eleven other Therbligs—the last one is "think!"

When Dad made a motion study, he broke down each operation into a Therblig, and then tried to reduce the time taken to perform each Therblig. Perhaps certain parts to be assembled could be painted red and others green, so as to reduce the time required for "search" and "find."

Perhaps the parts could be moved closer to the object being assembled, so as to reduce the time required for "transport loaded."

Every Therblig had its own symbol, and once they were painted on the wall Dad had us apply them to our household chores—bedmaking, dishwashing, sweeping, and dusting.

Meanwhile,
The Shoe
and the lighthouses had become a stop on some of the Nantucket sightseeing tours. The stop didn't entail getting out of the carriages or, later, the buses. But we'd hear the drivers giving lurid and inaccurate accounts of the history of the place and the family which inhabited it. Some individuals occasionally would come up to the door and ask if they could peek in, and if the house was presentable we'd usually show them around.

Then, unexpectedly, the names of strangers started appearing in a guest book which we kept in the front room.

"Are these friends of yours?" Dad asked Mother.

"I never heard of them before. Maybe they're friends of the children."

When we said we didn't know them, Dad questioned Tom Grieves, who admitted readily enough that he had been showing tourists through the house and lighthouses, while we were at the beach. Tom's tour included the dormitories; Mother and Dad's room, where the baby stayed; and even the lavatory, where he pointed out the code alphabet. Some of the visitors, seeing the guest book on the table, thought they were supposed to sign. Tom stood at the front door as the tourists filed out, and frequently collected tips.

Mother was irked. "I never heard of such a thing in all my born days. Imagine taking perfect strangers though our bedrooms, and the house a wreck, most likely."

"Well," said Dad, who was convinced the tourists had come to see his visual education methods, "there's no need for us to be selfish about the ideas we've developed. Maybe it's not a bad plan to let the public see what we're doing."

He leaned back reflectively in his chair, an old mahogany pew from some church. Dad had found the pew, disassembled, in the basement of our cottage. He had resurrected it reverently, rubbed it down, put it together, and varnished it. The pew was his seat of authority in
The Shoe,
and the only chair which fitted him comfortably and in which he could place complete confidence.

"I wonder how much money Tom took in," he said to Mother. "Maybe we could work out some sort of an arrangement so that Tom could split tips from future admissions..."

"The idea!" said Mother. "There'll be no future admissions. The very idea."

"Can't you take a joke? I was only joking. Where's your sense of humor?"

"I know:" Mother nodded her head. "I'm not supposed to have any. But did you ever stop to think that there might be some women, somewhere, who might think their husbands were joking if they said they had bought two lighthouses and..."

Dad started to laugh, and as he rocked back and forth he shook the house so that loose whitewash flaked off the ceiling and landed on the top of his head.When Dad laughed, everybody laughed—you couldn't help it. And Mother, after a losing battle to remain severe, joined in.

"By jingo," he wheezed. "And I guess there are some women, somewhere, who wouldn't want the Morse code, and planets, and even Therbligs, painted all over the walls of their house, either. Come over here, Boss, and let me take back everything I ever said about your sense of humor."

Mother walked over and brushed the whitewash out of what was left of his hair.

Dad acquired the
Rena
to reward us for learning to swim. She was a catboat, twenty feet long and almost as wide. She was docile, dignified, and ancient.

Before we were allowed aboard the
Rena,
Dad delivered a series of lectures about navigation, tides, the magnetic compass, seamanship, rope-splicing, right-of-way, and nautical terminology. Radar still had not been invented. It is doubtful if, outside the Naval Academy at Annapolis, any group of Americans ever received a more thorough indoctrination before setting foot on a catboat.

Next followed a series of dry runs, on the front porch of
The Shoe.
Dad, sitting in a chair and holding a walking stick as if it were a tiller, would bark out orders while maneuvering his imaginary craft around a tricky harbor.

We'd sit in line on the floor along side of him, pretending we were holding down the windward rail. Dad would rub imaginary spray out of his eyes, and scan the horizon for possible sperm whale, Flying Dutchmen, or floating ambergris.

"Great Point Light off the larboard bow," he'd bark. "Haul in the sheet and we'll try to clear her on this tack."

He'd ease the handle of the cane over toward the imaginary leeward rail, and two of us would haul in an imaginary rope.

"Steady as she goes," Dad would command. "Make her fast."

We'd make believe to twist the rope around a cleat.

"Coming about," he'd shout. "Low bridge. Ready about, hard a'lee."

This time he'd push the cane handle all the way over toward the leeward side. We'd duck our heads and then scramble across the porch to man the opposite rail.

"Now we'll come up and pick up our mooring.You do that at the end of every sail. Good sailors always make the mooring on the first try. Landlubbers sometimes have to go around three or four times before they can catch it."

He'd stand up in the stern, the better to squint at the imaginary mooring.

"Now. Let go your sheet, Bill. Stand by the center-board, Mart. Up on the bow with the boat hook, Anne and Ernestine, and mind you grab that mooring. Stand by the throat, Frank. Stand by the peak, Fred...."

We'd scurry around the porch going through our duties, until at last Dad was satisfied his new crew was ready for the high seas.

Dad was never happier than when aboard the
Rena.
From the moment he climbed into our dory to row out to
Rena's
mooring, his personality changed. On the
Rena,
we were no longer his flesh and blood, but a crew of landlubberly scum shanghaied from the taverns and fleshpots of many exotic ports.
Rena
was no scow-like catboat, but a sleek four-master, bound around the Horn with a bone in her teeth in search of rare spices and the priceless treasure of the Indies. He insisted that we address him as Captain, instead of Daddy, and every remark must needs be civil and end with a "Sir."

"It's just like when he was in the Army," Ernestine whispered. "Remember those military haircuts for Frank and Bill, and all that business of snapping to attention and learning to salute, and the kitchen police?"

"Avast there, you swabs," Dad hollered. "No mutinous whispering on the poop deck!"

Anne, being the oldest, was proclaimed first mate of the
Rena.
Ernestine was second mate, Martha third, and Frank fourth. All the younger children were able-bodied seamen who, presumably, ate hardtack and bunked before the mast.

"Seems to be blowing up, Mister," Dad said to Anne. "I'll have a reef in that mains'il."

"Aye, aye, Sir."

"The
Rena's
just got one sail, Daddy," Lill said. "Is that the mains'il?"

"Quiet, you landlubber, or you'll get the merrie rope's end. Of course it's the mains'il."

The merrie rope's end was no idle threat. Able-bodied seamen or mates who failed to leap when Dad barked an order did in fact receive a flogging with a piece of rope. It hurt, too.

Dad's mood was contagious, and soon the mates were as dogmatic and as full of invective as he, when dealing with the sneaking pickpockets and rum-palsied derelicts who were their subordinates. And, somehow, Dad passed along to us the illusion that placid old
Rena
was a taut ship.

"I'll have those halliards coiled," he told Anne.

"Aye, aye, Sir. Come on you swabs. Look alive now, or shiver my timbers if I don't keel haul the lot of you."

Sometimes, without warning, Dad would start to bellow out tuneless chanties about the fifteen men on a dead man's chest and, especially, one that went, "He said heave her to, she replied make it three."

If there had been any irons aboard, they would have been occupied by the fumbling landlubber or scurvy swab who forgot his duties and made Dad miss the mooring. Dad felt that to have to make a second try for the mooring was the supreme humiliation, and that fellow yachtsmen and professional sea captains all along the waterfront were splitting their sides laughing at him. He'd drop the tiller, grow red in the face, and advance rope in hand on the offender. More than once, the scurvy swab made a panic-stricken dive over the side, preferring to swim ashore, where he would cope ultimately with Dad, instead of meeting the captain on the latter's own quarterdeck.

On one occasion, when Dad blamed missing a mooring on general inefficiency and picked up a merrie rope's end to inflict merrie mass punishment, the entire crew leaped simultaneously over the side in an unrehearsed abandon-ship maneuver. Only the captain remained at the helm, from which vantage point he hurled threatening reminders about the danger of sharks and the penalties of mutiny. On that occasion, he brought
Rena
up to the mooring by himself, without any trouble, thus proving something we had long suspected—that he didn't really need our help at all, but enjoyed teaching us and having a crew to order around.

Through the years, old
Rena
remained phlegmatic, paying no apparent attention to the bedlam which had intruded into her twilight years. She was too old a seadog to learn new tricks.

Only once, just for a second, did she display any sign of temperament. It was after a long sail. A fog had come up, and
Rena
was as clammy as a shower curtain. We had missed the mooring on the first go-round, and the captain was in an ugly mood. We made the mooring all right on the second try. The captain, as was his custom, was standing in the stern, merrie rope in hand, shouting orders about lowering the sail. Just before the sail came down, a squall hit
Rena,
and she retaliated by whipping her boom savagely across the hull. The captain saw it coming, but didn't have time to duck. The boom caught him on the side of the head with a terrific clout, a blow hard enough to lift him off his feet and tumble him, stomach first, into the water.

The captain didn't come up for almost a minute. The crew, while losing little love for their captain, became frightened for their Daddy. We were just about to dive in after him when a pair of feet emerged from the water and the toes wiggled. We knew everything was all right then. The feet disappeared, and a few moments later Dad came up head first. His nose was bleeding, but he was grinning and didn't forget to spit the fine stream of water through his front teeth.

"The bird they call the elephant," he whispered weakly, and he was Dad then. But not for long. As soon as his head cleared and his strength came back, he was the captain again.