Cheaper by the Dozen (4 page)

While we were eating, Dad would keep looking around for something that might be interesting. He was a natural teacher, and believed in utilizing every minute. Eating, he said, was "unavoidable delay." So were dressing, face-washing, and hair-combing. "Unavoidable delay" was not to be wasted.

If Dad found an ant hill, he'd tell us about certain colonies of ants that kept slaves and herds of cows. Then we'd take turns lying on our stomachs, watching the ants go back and forth picking up crumbs from sandwiches.

"See, they all work and they don't waste anything," Dad would say, and you could tell that the ant was one of his favorite creatures. "Look at the teamwork, as four of them try to move that piece of meat. That's motion study for you."

Or he'd point out a stone wall and say it was a perfect example of engineering. He'd explain about how the glaciers passed over the earth many years ago, and left the stone when they melted.

If a factory was nearby, he'd explain how you used a plumb line to get the chimney straight and why the windows had been placed a certain way to let in the maximum light. If the factory whistle blew, he'd take out his stopwatch and time the difference between when the steam appeared and when we heard the sound.

"Now take out your notebooks and pencils and I'll show you how to figure the speed of sound," he'd say.

He insisted that we make a habit of using our eyes and ears every single minute.

"Look there," he'd say. "What do you see? Yes, I know, it's a tree. But look at it. Study it. What do you
see?

But it was Mother who spun the stories that made the things we studied really unforgettable. If Dad saw motion study and team-work in an ant hill, Mother saw a highly complex civilization governed, perhaps, by a fat old queen who had a thousand black slaves bring her breakfast in bed mornings. If Dad stopped to explain the construction of a bridge, she would find the workman in his blue jeans, eating his lunch high on the top of the span. It was she who made us feel the breathless height of the structure and the relative puniness of the humans who had built it. Or if Dad pointed out a tree that had been bent and gnarled, it was Mother who made us sense how the wind, eating against the tree in the endless passing of time, had made its own relentless mark.

We'd sit there memorizing every word, and Dad would look at Mother as if he was sure he had married the most wonderful person in the world.

Before we left our picnic site, Dad would insist that all of the sandwich wrappings and other trash be carefully gathered, stowed in the lunch box, and brought home for disposal.

"If there's anything I can't stand, it's a sloppy camper," he'd say. "We don't want to leave a single scrap of paper on this man's property. We're going to leave things just like we found them, only even more so. We don't want to overlook so much as an apple peel."

Apple peels were a particularly sore subject. Most of us liked our apples without skins, and Dad thought this was wasteful. When he ate an apple, he consumed skin, core, and seeds, which he alleged were the most healthful and most delectable portions of the fruit. Instead of starting at the side and eating his way around the equator, Dad started at the North Pole, and ate down through the core to the South.

He didn't actually forbid us to peel our apples or waste the cores, but he kept referring to the matter so as to let us know that he had noticed what we were doing.

Sometimes, in order to make sure that we left no rubbish behind, he'd have us form a line, like a company front in the army, and march across the picnic ground. Each of us was expected to pick up any trash in the territory that he covered.

The result was that we often came home with the leavings of countless previous picnickers.

"I don't see how you children can possibly clutter up a place the way you do," Dad would grin as he stuffed old papers, bottles, and rusty tin cans into the picnic box.

"That's not our mess, Daddy. You know that just as well as we do. What would we be doing with empty whiskey bottles and a last year's copy of the Hartford
Courant?

"That's what I'd like to know," he'd say, while sniffing the bottles.

Neither Dad nor Mother thought filling station toilets were sanitary. They never elaborated about just what diseases the toilets contained, but they made it plain that the ailments were both contagious and dire. In comparison, leprosy would be no worse than a bad cold. Dad always opened the door of a public rest room with his coattail, and the preparations and precautions that ensued were "unavoidable delay" in its worst aspect.

Once he and Mother had discarded filling stations as a possibility, the only alternative was the woods. Perhaps it was the nervous strain of enduring Dad's driving; perhaps it was simply that fourteen persons have different personal habits. At any rate, we seemed to stop at every promising clump of trees.

"I've seen dogs that paid less attention to trees," Dad used to groan.

For family delicacy, Dad coined two synonyms for going to the bathroom in the woods. One was "visiting Mrs. Murphy." The other was "examining the rear tire." They meant the same thing.

After a picnic, he'd say:

"How many have to visit Mrs. Murphy?"

Usually nobody would. But after we had been under way ten or fifteen minutes, someone would announce that he had to go. So Dad would stop the car, and Mother would take the girls into the woods on one side of the road, while Dad took the boys into the woods on the other.

"I know every piece of flora and fauna from Bangor, Maine, to Washington, DC!" Dad exclaimed bitterly.

On the way home, when it was dark, Bill used to crawl up into a swivel seat right behind Dad. Every time Dad was intent on steering while rounding a curve, Bill would reach forward and clutch his arm. Bill was a perfect mimic, and he'd whisper in Mother's voice, "Not so fast, Frank. Not so fast." Dad would think it was Mother grabbing his arm and whispering to him, and he'd make believe he didn't hear her.

Sometimes Bill would go into the act when the car was creeping along at a dignified thirty, and Dad finally would turn to Mother disgustedly and say:

"For the love of Mike, Lillie! I was only doing twenty."

He automatically subtracted ten miles an hour from the speed whenever he discussed the matter with Mother.

"I didn't say anything, Frank," Mother would tell him.

Dad would turn around, then, and see all of us giggling into our handkerchiefs. He'd give Bill a playful cuff and rumple his hair. Secretly, Dad was proud of Bill's imitations. He used to say that when Bill imitated a bird he (Dad) didn't dare to look up.

"You'll be the death of me yet, boy," Dad would say to Bill.

As we'd roll along, we'd sing three- and four-part harmony, with Mother and Dad joining in as soprano and bass. "Bobolink Swinging on the Bow,""Love's Old Sweet Song," "Our Highland Goat," "I've Been Working on the Railroad."

"What do only children
do
with themselves?" we'd think.

Dad would lean back against the seat and cock his hat on the side of his head. Mother would snuggle up against him as if she were cold. The babies were asleep now. Sometimes Mother turned around between songs and said to us: "Right now is the happiest time in the world." And perhaps it was.

Dad was born in Fairfield, Maine, where his father ran a general store, farmed, and raised harness-racing horses. John Hiram Gilbreth died in 1871, leaving his three-year-old son, two older daughters, and a stern and rockbound widow.

Dad's mother, Grandma Gilbreth, believed that her children were fated to make important marks in the world, and that her first responsibility was to educate them so they would be prepared for their rendezvous with destiny.

"After that," she told her Fairfield neighbors, with a knowing nod, "blood will tell."

Without any business ties to hold her in Maine, she moved to Andover, Massachusetts, so that the girls could attend Abbott Academy. Later, when her oldest daughter showed a talent for music, Grandma Gilbreth decided to move again. Every New Englander knew the location of the universe's seat of culture, and it was to Boston that she now journeyed with her flock.

Dad wanted, more than anything else, to be a construction engineer, and his mother planned to have him enter Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the time he finished high school, though, he decided this would be too great a drain on the family finances, and would interfere with his sisters' studies.Without consulting his mother, he took a job as a bricklayer's helper.

Once the deed was done, Grandma Gilbreth decided to make the best of it. After all, Mr. Lincoln had started by splitting rails.

"But if you're going to be a bricklayer's helper," she said, "for mercy sakes be a good bricklayer's helper."

"I'll do my best to find a good bricklayer to help," Dad grinned.

If Grandma thought Dad was going to be a good helper, his new foreman thought he was the worst he had encountered in forty years, man and boy, of bricklaying.

During Dad's first week at work he made so many suggestions about how brick could be laid faster and better that the foreman threatened repeatedly to fire him.

"You're the one who came here to learn," the foreman hollered at him. "For Christ's sake don't try to learn us."

Subtle innuendoes like that never worried Dad. Besides, he already knew that motion study was his element, and he had discovered something that apparently had never attracted the attention of industry before. He tried to explain it to the foreman.

"Did you ever notice that no two men use exactly the same way of laying bricks?" he asked. "That's important, and do you know why?"

"I know that if you open your mouth about bricklaying again, I'll lay a brick in it."

"It's important because if one bricklayer is doing the job the right way, then all the others are doing the job the wrong way. Now, if I had your job, I'd find who's laying brick the right way, and make all the others copy him."

"If you had my job," shouted the livid-faced foreman, "the first thing you'd do is fire the red-headed unprintable son of a ruptured deleted who tried to get
your
job. And that's what I think you're trying to do."

He picked up a brick and waved it menacingly.

"I may not be smart enough to know who my best bricklayer is, but I know who my worst hod-carrier is. I'm warning you, stop bothering me or this brick goes in your mouth—edgewise."

Within a year, Dad designed a scaffold that made him the fastest bricklayer on the job. The principle of the scaffold was that loose bricks and mortar always were at the level of the top of the wall being built. The other bricklayers had to lean over to get their materials. Dad didn't.

"You ain't smart," the foreman scoffed. "You're just too God-damned lazy to squat."

But the foreman had identical scaffolds built for all the men on the job, and even suggested that Dad send the original to the Mechanics Institute, where it won a prize. Later, on the foreman's recommendation, Dad was made foreman of a crew of his own. He achieved such astonishing speed records that he was promoted to superintendent, and then went into the contracting business for himself, building bridges, canals, industrial towns, and factories. Sometimes, after the contract work was finished, he was asked to remain on the job to install his motion study methods within the factory itself.

By the time he was twenty-seven, he had offices in New York, Boston, and London. He had a yacht, smoked cigars, and had a reputation as a snappy dresser.

Mother came from a well-to-do family in Oakland, California. She had met Dad in Boston while she was en route to Europe on one of those well-chaperoned tours for fashionable young ladies of the 'nineties.

Mother was a Phi Beta Kappa and a psychology graduate of the University of California. In those days women who were scholars were viewed with some suspicion. When Mother and Dad were married, the Oakland paper said:

"Although a graduate of the University of California, the bride is nonetheless an extremely attractive young woman."

Indeed she was.

So it was Mother the psychologist and Dad the motion study man and general contractor, who decided to look into the new field of the psychology of management, and the old field of psychologically managing a houseful of children. They believed that what would work in the home would work in the factory, and what would work in the factory would work in the home.

Dad put the theory to a test shortly after we moved to Montclair. The house was too big for Tom Grieves, the handyman, and Mrs. Cunningham, the cook, to keep in order. Dad decided we were going to have to help them, and he wanted us to offer the help of our own accord. He had found that the best way to get cooperation out of employees in a factory was to set up a joint employer-employee board, which would make work assignments on a basis of personal choice and aptitude. He and Mother set up a Family Council, patterned after an employer-employee board. The Council met every Sunday afternoon, immediately after dinner.

At the first session, Dad got to his feet formally, poured a glass of ice water, and began a speech.

"You will notice," he said, "that I am installed here as your chairman. I assume there are no objections. The chair, hearing no objections, will—"

"Mr. Chairman," Anne interrupted. Being in high school, she knew something of parliamentary procedure, and thought it might be a good idea to have the chairman represent the common people.

"Out of order," said Dad. "Very much out of order when the chair has the floor."

"But you said you heard no objections, and I want to object."

"Out of order means sit down, and you're out of order," Dad shouted. He took a swallow of ice water, and resumed his speech. "The first job of the Council is to apportion necessary work in the house and yard. Does the chair hear any suggestions?"

There were no suggestions. Dad forced a smile and attempted to radiate good humor.

"Come, come, fellow members of the Council," he said. "This is a democracy. Everybody has an equal voice. How do you want to divide the work?"