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To Your Good Health
By Paul G. Donohue, M. D.
Insulin
Delivered by Pump
DEAR DR.
DONOHUE: I have been an insulin-using diabetic
for 15 years. The insulin pump idea intrigues me.
I have to give myself as many as four shots a
day, and I am getting tired of the inconvenience.
What are your thoughts on the pump? Would I
benefit from it? -- K.K.
ANSWER: The
insulin pump delivers insulin at a constant rate
through a slender, plastic tube inserted with a
needle under the skin at the same body depth
where a person injects insulin. The pump itself
is about the size of a thin beeper. It’s
worn on the belt or put in a pocket. The plastic
tube is taped to the skin.
Pumps have been
around for more than 20 years. They’re a
reliable way to get insulin into the body. They
can be programmed to deliver larger amounts of
insulin at the times of day and night when more
is needed. For example, during sleep, just before
wakening, blood sugar rises in the early-morning
hours. The pump can inject more insulin at that
time. The same goes for mealtimes.
A person with a
pump must still check his or her blood sugar. If
it’s high, the pump user can activate the
pump to release a surge of insulin.
I think insulin
pumps are wonderful, but they’re not for
everyone. They take some getting used to, and a
person needs special instructions to learn their
ins and outs. More than 200,000 Americans avail
themselves of a pump. For those who have to
inject themselves many times a day, the pumps are
a real boon.
OLD GORGON
GRAHAM
More Letters from
a Self-Made
Merchant
to His Son
by
George Horace Lorimer
First
Published 1903
From John Graham, head of the
house of Graham & Company, pork packers, in
Chicago, familiarly known on ‘Change as Old
Gorgon Graham, to his son, Pierrepont, at the
Union Stock Yards.
No. 14
FROM John Graham,
at the Omaha branch of Graham & Company, to
his son, Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards,
Chicago. The old man has been advised by wire of
the arrival of a prospective partner, and that
the mother, the son, and the business are all
doing well.
OMAHA, October 6, 1900.
Dear Pierrepont: I’m so
blame glad it’s a boy that I’m getting
over feeling sorry it ain’t a girl, and
I’m almost reconciled to it’s not being
twins. Twelve pounds, bully! Maybe that
doesn’t keep up the Graham reputation for
giving good weight! But I’m coming home on
the run to heft him myself, because I never knew
a fellow who wouldn’t lie a little about the
weight of number one, and then, when you led him
up to the hay scales, claim that it’s a
well-known scientific principle that children
shrink during the first week like a ham in smoke.
Allowing for tare, though, if he still nets ten
I’ll feel that he’s a credit to the
brand.
It’s a great thing to be
sixty minutes old, with nothing in the world
except a blanket and an appetite, and the whole
fight ahead of you; but it’s pretty good,
too, to be sixty years old, and a grandpop, with
twenty years of fight left in you still. It sort
of makes me feel, though, as if it were almost
time I had a young fellow hitched up beside me
who was strong enough to pull his half of the
load and willing enough so that he’d keep
the traces taut on his side. I don’t want
any double-team arrangement where I have to pull
the load and the other horse, too. But you seem
strong, and you act willing, so when I get back I
reckon we’ll hitch for a little trial spin.
A good partner ought to be like a good wife-a
source of strength to a man. But it isn’t
reasonable to tie up with six and expect that
you’re going to have half a dozen happy
homes.
They say that there are three
generations between shirt-sleeves and
shirt-sleeves in a good many families, but I
don’t want any such gap as that in ours. I
hope to live long enough to see the kid with us
at the Stock Yards, and all three of us with our
coats off hustling to make the business hum. If I
shouldn’t, you must keep the boy strong in
the faith. It makes me a little uneasy when I go
to New York and see the carryings-on of some of
the old merchants’ grandchildren. I
don’t think it’s true, as Andy says,
that to die rich is to die disgraced, but
it’s the case pretty often that to die rich
is to be disgraced afterward by a lot of
light-weight heirs.
Every now and then some blame
fool stops me on the street to say that he
supposes I’ve got to the point now where
I’m going to quit and enjoy myself; and when
I tell him I’ve been enjoying myself for
forty years and am going to keep right on at it,
he goes off shaking his head and telling people
I’m a money-grubber. He can’t see that
it’s the fellow who doesn’t enjoy his
work and who quits just because he’s made
money that’s the money-grubber; or that the
man who keeps right on is fighting for something
more than a little sugar on his bread and butter.
When a doctor reaches the point
where he’s got a likely little bunch of
dyspeptics giving him ten dollars apiece for
telling them to eat something different from what
they have been eating, and to chew it-people
don’t ask him why he doesn’t quit and
live on the interest of his dyspepsia money. By
the time he’s gained his financial
independence, he’s lost his personal
independence altogether. For it’s just about
then that he’s reached the age where he can
put a little extra sense and experience into his
pills; so he can’t turn around without some
one’s sticking out his tongue at him and
asking him to guess what he had for dinner that
disagreed with him. It never occurs to these
people that he will let his experience and
ability go to waste, just because he has made
money enough to buy a little dyspepsia of his
own, and it never occurs to him to quit for any
such foolish reason.
You’ll meet a lot of
first-class idiots in this world, who regard
business as low and common, because their low and
common old grandpas made money enough so they
don’t have to work. And you’ll meet a
lot of second-class fools who carry a line of
something they call culture, which bears about
the same relation to real education that canned
corned beef does to porterhouse steak with
mushrooms; and these fellows shudder a little at
the mention of business, and moan over the mad
race for wealth, and deplore the coarse
commercialism of the age. But while they may have
no special use for a business man, they always
have a particular use for his money. You want to
be ready to spring back while you’re talking
to them, because when a fellow doesn’t think
it’s refined to mention money, and calls it
an honorarium, he’s getting ready to hit you
for a little more than the market price.
I’ve had dealings with a good many of these
shy, sensitive souls who shrink from mentioning
the dollar, but when it came down to the point of
settling the bill, they usually tried to charge a
little extra for the shock to their refinement.
The fact of the matter is, that
we’re all in trade when we’ve got
anything, from poetry to pork, to sell; and
it’s all foolishness to talk about one
fellow’s goods being sweller than
another’s. The only way in which he can be
different is by making them better. But if we
haven’t anything to sell, we ain’t
doing anything to shove the world along; and we
ought to make room on it for some coarse,
commercial cuss with a sample-case.
I’ve met a heap of men who
were idling through life because they’d made
money or inherited it, and so far as I could see,
about all that they could do was to read till
they got the dry rot, or to booze till they got
the wet rot. All books and no business makes Jack
a jack-in-the-box, with springs and wheels in his
head; all play and no work makes Jack a jackass,
with bosh in his skull. The right prescription
for him is play when he really needs it, and work
whether he needs it or not; for that dose makes
Jack a cracker-jack.
Like most fellows who
haven’t any too much of it, I’ve a
great deal of respect for education, and
that’s why I’m sorry to see so many men
who deal in it selling gold-bricks to young
fellows who can’t afford to be buncoed. It
would be a mighty good thing if we could put a
lot of the professors at work in the offices and
shops, and give these canned-culture boys jobs in
the glue and fertilizer factories until a little
of their floss and foolishness had worn off. For
it looks to an old fellow, who’s taking a
bird’s-eye view from the top of a packing
house, as if some of the colleges were still
running their plants with machinery that would
have been sent to the scrap-heap, in any other
business, a hundred years ago. They turn out a
pretty fair article as it is, but with improved
machinery they could save a lot of waste and
by-products and find a quicker market for their
output. But it’s the years before our kid
goes to college that I’m worrying about now.
For I believe that we ought to teach a boy how to
use his hands as well as his brain; that he ought
to begin his history lessons in the present and
work back to B.C. about the time he is ready to
graduate; that he ought to know a good deal about
the wheat belt before he begins loading up with
the list of Patagonian products; that he ought to
post up on Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland
and Thomas Edison first, and save Rameses Second
to while away the long winter evenings after
business hours, because old Rameses is embalmed
and guaranteed to keep anyway; that if he’s
inclined to be tonguey he ought to learn a living
language or two, which he can talk when a Dutch
buyer pretends he doesn’t understand
English, before he tackles a dead one which in
all probability he will only give decent
interment in his memory.
Of course, it’s a fine
thing to know all about the past and to have the
date when the geese cackled in Rome down pat, but
life is the present and the future. The really
valuable thing which we get from the past is
experience, and a fellow can pick up a pretty
fair working line of that along La Salle Street.
A boy’s education should begin with today,
deal a little with tomorrow, and then go back to
day before yesterday. But when a fellow begins
with the past, it’s apt to take him too long
to catch up with the present. A man can learn
better most of the things that happened between
A.D. 1492 and B.C. 5000 after he’s grown,
for then he can sense their meaning and remember
what’s worth knowing. But you take the
average boy who’s been loaded up with this
sort of stuff, and dig into him, and his mind is
simply a cemetery of useless dates from the
tombstones of those tough and sporty old kings,
with here and there the jaw-bone of an ass who
made a living by killing every one in sight and
unsettling business for honest men. Some
professors will tell you that it’s good
training anyway to teach boys a lot of things
they’re going to forget, but it’s been
my experience that it’s the best training to
teach them things they’ll remember.
I simply mention these matters
in a general way. I don’t want you to
underestimate the value of any sort of knowledge,
and I want you to appreciate the value of other
work besides your own-music and railroading,
ground and lofty tumbling and banking, painting
pictures and soap advertising; because if
you’re not broad enough to do this
you’re just as narrow as those fellows who
are running the culture corner, and your mind
will get so blame narrow it will overlap.
I want to raise our kid to be a
poor man’s son, and then, if it’s
necessary, we can always teach him how to be a
rich one’s. Child nature is human nature,
and a man who understands it can make his
children like the plain, sensible things and ways
as easily as the rich and foolish ones. I
remember a nice old lady who was raising a lot of
orphan grandchildren on a mighty slim income.
They couldn’t have chicken often in that
house, and when they did it was a pretty close
fit and none to throw away. So instead of
beginning with the white meat and stirring up the
kids like a cage full of hyenas when the
"feeding the carnivora" sign is out,
she would play up the pieces that don’t even
get a mention on the bill-of-fare of a two-dollar
country hotel. She would begin by saying in a
please-don’t-all-speak-at-once tone,
"Now, children, who wants this dear little
neck?" and naturally they all wanted it,
because it was pretty plain to them that it was
something extra sweet and juicy. So she would
allot it as a reward of goodness to the child who
had been behaving best, and throw in the gizzard
for nourishment. The nice old lady always helped
herself last, and there was nothing left for her
but white meat.
It isn’t the final result
which the nice old lady achieved, but the first
one, that I want to commend. A child naturally
likes the simple things till you teach him to
like the rich ones; and it’s just as easy to
start him with books and amusements that hold
sense and health as those that are filled with
slop and stomach-ache. A lot of mothers think a
child starts out with a brain that can’t
learn anything but nonsense; so when Maudie asks
a sensible question they answer in goo-goo gush.
And they believe that a child can digest
everything from carpet tacks to fried steak, so
whenever Willie hollers they think he’s
hungry, and try to plug his throat with a banana.
You want to have it in mind all
the time while you’re raising this boy that
you can’t turn over your children to
subordinates, any more than you can your
business, and get good results. Nurses and
governesses are no doubt all right in their
place, but there’s nothing "just as
good" as a father and mother. A boy
doesn’t pick up cuss-words when his
mother’s around or learn cussedness from his
father. Yet a lot of mothers turn over the
children, along with the horses and dogs, to be
fed and broken by the servants, and then wonder
from which side of the family Isobel inherited
her weak stomach, and where she picked up her
naughty ways, and why she drops the h’s from
some words and pronounces others with a brogue.
But she needn’t look to Isobel for any
information, because she is the only person about
the place with whom the child ain’t on free
and easy terms.
I simply mention these things
in passing. Life is getting broader and business
bigger right along, and we’ve got to breed a
better race of men if we’re going to keep
just a little ahead of it. There are a lot of
problems in the business now-trust problems and
labor problems-that I’m getting old enough
to shirk, which you and the boy must meet, though
I’m not doing any particular worrying about
them. While I believe that the trusts are pretty
good things in theory, a lot of them have been
pretty bad things in practice, and we shall be
mighty slow to hook up with one.
The trouble is that too many
trusts start wrong. A lot of these fellows take a
strong, sound business idea-the economy of cost
in manufacture and selling-and hitch it to a load
of the rottenest business principle in the
bunch-the inflation of the value of your plant
and stock-, and then wonder why people hold their
noses when their outfit drives down Wall Street.
Of course, when you stop a little leakage between
the staves and dip out the sugar by the bucket
from the top, your net gain is going to be a
deficit for somebody. So if these fellows try to
do business as they should do it, by clean and
sound methods and at fair and square prices, they
can’t earn money enough to satisfy their
stockholders, and they get sore; and if they try
to do business in the only way that’s left,
by clubbing competition to death, and gouging the
public, then the whole country gets sore. It
seems to me that a good many of these trusts are
at a stage where the old individual character of
the businesses from which they came is dead, and
a new corporate character hasn’t had time to
form and strengthen. Naturally, when a youngster
hangs fire over developing a conscience,
he’s got to have one licked into him.
Personally, I want to see fewer
businesses put into trusts on the canned-soup
theory-add hot water and serve-before I go into
one; and I want to know that the new concern is
going to put a little of itself into every case
that leaves the plant, just as I have always put
in a little of myself. Of course, I don’t
believe that this stage of the trusts can last,
because, in the end, a business that is founded
on doubtful values and that makes money by
doubtful methods will go to smash or be smashed,
and the bigger the business the bigger the smash.
The real trust-busters are going to be the
crooked trusts, but so long as they can keep out
of jail they will make it hard for the sound and
straight ones to prove their virtue. Yet once the
trust idea strikes bed-rock, and a trust is built
up of sound properties on a safe valuation; once
the most capable man has had time to rise to the
head, and a new breed, trained to the new idea,
to grow up under him; and once dishonest
competition-not hard competition-is made a
penitentiary offense, and the road to the
penitentiary macadamized so that it won’t be
impassable to the fellows who ride in
automobiles-then there’ll be no more
trust-busting talk, because a trust will be the
most efficient, the most economical, and the most
profitable way of doing business; and
there’s no use bucking that idea or no sense
in being so foolish as to want to. It would be
like grabbing a comet by the tail and trying to
put a twist in it. And there’s nothing about
it for a young fellow to be afraid of, because a
good man isn’t lost in a big business-he
simply has bigger opportunities and more of them.
The larger the interests at stake, the less
people are inclined to jeopardize them by putting
them in the hands of any one but the best man in
sight.
I’m not afraid of any
trust that’s likely to come along for a
while, because Graham & Co. ain’t any
spring chicken. I’m not too old to change,
but I don’t expect to have to just yet, and
so long as the trust and labor situation remains
as it is I don’t believe that you and I and
the kid can do much better than to follow my old
rule:
Mind your own business; own
your own business; and run your own business.
Your affectionate father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
THE END.
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