He landed in Normandy on the fourth day of the invasion. His burly first sergeant shot himself in the foot as soon as they landed and his bloodthirsty company commander cracked up after three hours of combat. The modest and decent men like himself were the truly brave. He was wounded on his third day in combat and flown back to a hospital in England. When he returned to his company he was transferred to headquarters and he stayed there until his discharge. That was four years out of his life, four years cut out of the career of a young man. When he got back to Superior his aunt was dead and his mother was dying. When he buried her he was left with three thousand dollars in medical bills, a fourteen-hundred-dollar bill from the undertaker and a seven-thousand-dollar mortgage on a house nobody wanted to buy. He was twenty-seven years old. He poured himself another glass of sherry. “I never had an electric train,” he said aloud. “I never had a dog.”
He got a job in the Veterans Administration in Duluth and learned another lesson. Most men were born in debt, lived in debt and died in debt. Conscientiousness and industry were no match for the burdens of indebtedness. What he needed was an inspiration, a gamble, and standing on a little hill outside Superior one night he had an inspiration. In the distance he could see the lights of Duluth. Below him were the flat roofs of a cannery. The evening wind from Duluth blew in his direction and on this wind he heard the barking of dogs. His thinking took these lines. Two thousand people lived on the hill. Everyone on the hill had a dog. Every dog ate at least a can of food a day. People loved their dogs and were ready to pay good money to feed them but who knew what went into a can of dog food? What did dogs like? Table scraps, garbage and horse buns. Stray dogs always had the finest coats and enjoyed the best health. All he needed was a selling point. Ye Olde English Dog Food! England meant roast beef to most people. Put a label like that on a can and dog owners would pay as high as twenty-five cents. The noise from the cannery fitted in with all of this and he went happily to bed.
He experimented with dogs in the neighborhood and settled on a formula that was ninety per cent floor sweepings from the breakfast-food factory, ten per cent horse buns from the riding stable and enough water to make the mixture moist. He had a label designed and printed with a heraldic shield and “Ye Olde English Dog Food” in a florid script. The cannery agreed to process a lot of a thousand and he rented a truck and took a load to the cannery in ashcans. When the cans were labeled and crated and stored in his garage he felt that he possessed something valuable and beautiful. He bought a new suit and began going around to the markets of Duluth with a sample can of Olde English.
The story was the same everywhere. The grocers bought from the jobbers and when he approached the jobbers they explained that they couldn’t handle his food. The dog food they sold was pushed by the Chicago meat-packers on a price tie-in basis with the rest of their products and he couldn’t compete with Chicago. He tried peddling his dog food on the hill but you can’t sell dog food door to door and he learned a bitter lesson. The independent doesn’t have a chance. Duluth was full of hungry dogs and he had a thousand cans of feed stored in his garage but as an independent he was helpless to bring them profitably together. Remembering this, he had another glass of sherry.
It was dark by then. The light had gone from the window and he dressed to go down for supper. He was the only customer in the dining room, where Mabel Moulton brought him a bowl of greasy soup in which a burnt match was swimming. The burnt match, like the chamber pot, made his hatred of St. Botolphs implacable. “Oh, I’m awful sorry,” Mabel said, when he showed her the match. “I’m awful sorry. You see, my father had a stroke last month and we’re awful short-handed. Things aren’t the way we’d like to have them. The pilot light on the gas range isn’t working and the cook has to keep lighting the range with matches and I expect that’s how a match got into your soup. Well, I’ll take away your soup and bring you the pot roast and I’ll make sure there’s no matches in that. Notice that I’m taking off your plate with my
