To Your Good Health
By Paul G. Donohue, M.D.
Can Vitamins
Prevent Macular Degeneration?
DEAR DR. DONOHUE:
In the last years of his life, my dad suffered
from macular degeneration, and it made his life
difficult. No one else in my family has had it. I
hear vitamins can prevent it. If that is so,
which ones, and how much? -- D.G.
ANSWER:
Age-related macular degeneration happens later in
life, usually well after 50. Family history and
genes have a hand in its development, but having
had one parent with it does not doom a person to
coming down with it too. Smoking and a high-fat
diet increase the risk of it. Eating lots of
green, leafy vegetables and having fish twice a
week appear to prevent it.
When the doctor
looks into your eyes with a scope, he or she can
tell you if there are signs that you might face
macular degeneration in the future. Yellow
deposits in the retina are warning signs that it
could crop up. Those deposits are called drusens.
The macula is a
small, circular area of the retina that contains
visual cells necessary for reading and fine work.
"Degeneration" means that those cells
begin to wither and die. Advanced macular
degeneration affects sight needed for central
vision, but off-to-the-side vision remains.
The
vitamin-mineral treatment you ask about
doesn’t prevent macular degeneration nor
does it prevent the progression of mild macular
changes. It can slow the worsening of moderate or
severe macular degeneration. The daily regimen is
500 mg of vitamin C, 400 IU of vitamin E, 15 mg
of beta carotene, 80 mg of zinc and 2 mg of
copper. This isn’t something that people
should start taking on their own; it’s
something that should come recommended by their
doctor. These doses of vitamins and minerals are
higher than the recommended daily allowance calls
for.
LETTERS from
a SELF-MADE
MERCHANT
to his SON.
by George Horace
Lorimer
First
published October, 1902
Being the Letters
written by 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,
facetiously known to his intimates as
"Piggy."
No.16
FROM John Graham, at the
Schweitzerkasenhof, Karlsbad, Austria, to his
son, Pierrepont, at theUnion Stock Yards,
Chicago. Mr. Pierrepont has shown mild symptoms
of an attack of society fever, and his father is
administering some simple remedies.
XVI
KARLSBAD, October
6, 189-
Dear Pierrepont:
If you happen to run across Doc Titherington
you’d better tell him to go into training,
because I expect to be strong enough to lick him
by the time I get back. Between that ten-day boat
which he recommended and these Dutch doctors,
I’m almost well and about broke. You
don’t really have to take the baths here to
get rid of your rheumatism--their bills scare it
out of a fellow.
They tell me we
had a pretty quiet trip across, and I’m not
saying that we didn’t, because for the first
three days I was so busy holding myself in my
berth that I couldn’t get a chance to look
out the porthole to see for myself. I reckon
there isn’t anything alive that can beat me
at being seasick, unless it’s a camel, and
he’s got three stomachs.
When I did get
around I was a good deal of a maverick--for all
the old fellows were playing poker in the
smoking-room and all the young ones were
lallygagging under the boats--until I found that
we were carrying a couple of hundred steers
between decks. They looked mighty homesick, you
bet, and I reckon they sort of sized me up as
being a long ways from Chicago, for we cottoned
to each other right from the start. Take ‘em
as they ran, they were a mighty likely bunch of
steers, and I got a heap of solid comfort out of
them. There must have been good money in them,
too, for they reached England in prime condition.
I wish you would
tell our people at the Beef House to look into
this export cattle business, and have all the
facts and figures ready for me when I get back.
There seems to be a good margin in it, and with
our English house we are fixed up to handle it
all right at this end. It makes me mighty sick to
think that we’ve been sitting back on our
hindlegs and letting the other fellow run away
with this trade. We are packers, I know, but
that’s no reason why we can’t be
shippers, too. I want to milk the critter coming
and going, twice a day, and milk her dry. Unless
you do the whole thing you can’t do anything
in business as it runs to-day. There’s still
plenty of room at the top, but there isn’t
much anywheres else.
There may be
reasons why we haven’t been able to tackle
this exporting of live cattle, but you can tell
our people there that they have got to be mighty
good reasons to wipe out the profit I see in it.
Of course, I may have missed them, for I’ve
only looked into the business a little by way of
recreation, but it won’t do to say that
it’s not in our line, because anything which
carries a profit on four legs is in our line.
I dwell a little
on the matter because, while this special case is
out of your department, the general principle is
in it. The way to think of a thing in business is
to think of it first, and the way to get a share
of the trade is to go for all of it. Half the
battle’s in being on the hilltop first; and
the other half’s in staying there. In
speaking of these matters, and in writing you
about your new job, I’ve run a little ahead
of your present position, because I’m
counting on you to catch up with me. But you want
to get it clearly in mind that I’m writing
to you not as the head of the house, but as the
head of the family, and that I don’t propose
to mix the two things.
Even as assistant
manager of the lard department, you don’t
occupy a very important position with us yet. But
the great trouble with some fellows is that a
little success goes to their heads. Instead of
hiding their authority behind their backs and
trying to get close to their men, they use it as
a club to keep them off. And a boss with a case
of big-head will fill an office full of sore
heads.
I don’t know
any one who has better opportunities for making
himself unpopular than an assistant, for the
clerks are apt to cuss him for all the
manager’s meanness, and the manager is
likely to find fault with him for all the
clerks’ cussedness. But if he explains his
orders to the clerks he loses his authority, and
if he excuses himself to the manager he loses his
usefulness. A manager needs an assistant to take
trouble from him, not to bring it to him.
The one important
thing for you to remember all the time is not to
forget. It’s easier for a boss to do a thing
himself than to tell some one twice to do it.
Petty details take up just as much room in a
manager’s head as big ideas; and the more of
the first you store for him, the more warehouse
room you leave him for the second. When a boss
has to spend his days swearing at his assistant
and the clerks have to sit up nights hating him,
they haven’t much time left to swear by the
house. Satisfaction is the oil of the business
machine.
Some fellows can
only see those above them, and others can only
see those under them, but a good man is
cross-eyed and can see both ends at once. An
assistant who becomes his manager’s right
hand is going to find the left hand helping him;
and it’s not hard for a clerk to find good
points in a boss who finds good ones in him.
Pulling from above and boosting from below make
climbing easy.
In handling men,
your own feelings are the only ones that are of
no importance. I don’t mean by this that you
want to sacrifice your self-respect, but you must
keep in mind that the bigger the position the
broader the man must be to fill it. And a diet of
courtesy and consideration gives girth to a boss.
Of course, all
this is going to take so much time and thought
that you won’t have a very wide margin left
for golf--especially in the afternoons. I simply
mention this in passing, because I see in the
Chicago papers which have been sent me that you
were among the players on the links one afternoon
a fortnight ago. Golf’s a nice, foolish
game, and there ain’t any harm in it so far
as I know except for the balls--the stiff balls
at the beginning, the lost balls in the middle,
and the highballs at the end of the game. But a
young fellow who wants to be a boss butcher
hasn’t much daylight to waste on any kind of
links except sausage links.
Of course, a man
should have a certain amount of play, just as a
boy is entitled to a piece of pie at the end of
his dinner, but he don’t want to make a meal
of it. Any one who lets sinkers take the place of
bread and meat gets bilious pretty young; and
these fellows who haven’t any job, except to
blow the old man’s dollars, are a good deal
like the little kids in the pie-eating contest at
the County Fair--they’ve a-plenty of pastry
and they’re attracting a heap of attention,
but they’ve got a stomach-ache coming to
them by and by.
I want to caution
you right here against getting the society bug in
your head. I’d sooner you’d smoke these
Turkish cigarettes which smell like a fire in the
fertilizer factory. You’re going to meet a
good many stray fools in the course of business
every day without going out to hunt up the main
herd after dark.
Everybody over
here in Europe thinks that we haven’t any
society in America, and a power of people in New
York think that we haven’t any society in
Chicago. But so far as I can see there are just
as many ninety-nine-cent men spending
million-dollar incomes in one place as another;
and the rules that govern the game seem to be the
same in all three places--you’ve got to be a
descendant to belong, and the farther you descend
the harder you belong. The only difference is
that, in Europe, the ancestor who made money
enough so that his family could descend, has been
dead so long that they have forgotten his shop;
in New York he’s so recent that they can
only pretend to have forgotten it; but in Chicago
they can’t lose it because the ancestor is
hustling on the Board of Trade or out at the
Stock Yards. I want to say right here that I
don’t propose to be an ancestor until after
I’m dead. Then, if you want to have some
fellow whose grandfather sold bad whiskey to the
Indians sniff and smell pork when you come into
the room, you can suit yourself.
Of course, I may
be off in sizing this thing up, because it’s
a little out of my line. But it’s been my
experience that these people who think that they
are all the choice cuts off the critter, and that
the rest of us are only fit for sausage, are
usually chuck steak when you get them under the
knife. I’ve tried two or three of them, who
had gone broke, in the office, but when you
separate them from their money there’s
nothing left, not even their friends.
I never see a
fellow trying to crawl or to buy his way into
society that I don’t think of my old friend
Hank Smith and his wife Kate--Kate Botts she was
before he married her--and how they tried to butt
their way through the upper crust.
Hank and I were
boys together in Missouri, and he stayed along in
the old town after I left. I heard of him on and
off as tending store a little, and farming a
little, and loafing a good deal. Then I forgot
all about him, until one day a few years ago when
he turned up in the papers as Captain Henry
Smith, the Klondike Gold King, just back from
Circle City, with a million in dust and anything
you please in claims. There’s never any
limit to what a miner may be worth in those,
except his imagination.
I was a little
puzzled when, a week later, my office boy brought
me a card reading Colonel Henry Augustus
Bottes-Smythe, but I supposed it was some
distinguished foreigner who had come to size me
up so that he could round out his roast on
Chicago in his new book, and I told the boy to
show the General in.
I’ve got a
pretty good memory for faces, and I’d bought
too much store plug of Hank in my time not to
know him, even with a clean shave and a plug hat.
Some men dry up with success, but it was just
spouting out of Hank. Told me he’d made his
pile and that he was tired of living on the slag
heap; that he’d spent his whole life where
money hardly whispered, let alone talked, and he
was going now where it would shout. Wanted to
know what was the use of being a nob if a fellow
wasn’t the nobbiest sort of a nob. Said
he’d bought a house on Beacon Hill, in
Boston, and that if I’d prick up my ears
occasionally I’d hear something drop into
the Back Bay. Handed me his new card four times
and explained that it was the rawest sort of dog
to carry a brace of names in your card holster;
that it gave you the drop on the swells every
time, and that they just had to throw up both
hands and pass you the pot when you showed down.
Said that Bottes was old English for Botts, and
that Smythe was new American for Smith; the
Augustus was just a fancy touch, a sort of
high-card kicker.
I didn’t
explain to Hank, because it was congratulations
and not explanations that he wanted, and I make
it a point to show a customer the line of goods
that he’s looking for. And I never heard the
full particulars of his experiences in the East,
though, from what I learned afterward, Hank
struck Boston with a bang, all right.
He located his
claim on Beacon Hill, between a Mayflower
descendant and a Declaration Signer’s
great-grandson, breeds which believe that when
the Lord made them He was through, and that the
rest of us just happened. And he hadn’t been
in town two hours before he started in to make
improvements. There was a high wrought-iron
railing in front of his house, and he had that
gilded first thing, because, as he said, he
wasn’t running a receiving vault and he
didn’t want any mistakes. Then he bought a
nice, open barouche, had the wheels painted red,
hired a coachman and started out in style to be
sociable and get acquainted. Left his card all
the way down one side of Beacon Street, and then
drove back leaving it on the other. Everywhere he
stopped he found that the whole family was out.
Kept it up a week, on and off, but didn’t
seem to have any luck. Thought that the men must
be hot sports and the women great gadders to keep
on the jump so much. Allowed that they were the
liveliest little lot of fleas that he had ever
chased. Decided to quit trying to nail ‘em
one at a time, and planned out something that he
reckoned would round up the whole bunch.
Hank sent out a
thousand invitations to his grand opening, as he
called it; left one at every house within a mile.
Had a brass band on the front steps and fireworks
on the roof. Ordered forty kegs from the brewery
and hired a fancy mixer to sling together mild
snorts, as he called them, for the ladies. They
tell me that, when the band got to going good on
the steps and the fireworks on the roof, even
Beacon Street looked out the windows to see what
was doing. There must have been ten thousand
people in the street and not a soul but Hank and
his wife and the mixer in the house. Some one
yelled speech, and then the whole crowd took it
up, till Hank came out on the steps. He shut off
the band with one hand and stopped the fireworks
with the other. Said that speechmaking
wasn’t his strangle-hold; that he’d
been living on snowballs in the Klondike for so
long that his gas-pipe was frozen; but that this
welcome started the ice and he thought about
three fingers of the plumber’s favorite
prescription would cut out the frost. Would the
crowd join him? He had invited a few friends in
for the evening, but there seemed to be some
misunderstanding about the date, and he hated to
have good stuff curdle on his hands.
While this was
going on, the Mayflower descendant was
telephoning for the police from one side and the
Signer’s great-grandson from the other, and
just as the crowd yelled and broke for the house
two patrol wagons full of policemen got there.
But they had to turn in a riot call and bring out
the reserves before they could break up
Hank’s little Boston tea-party.
After all, Hank
did what he started out to do with his
party--rounded up all his neighbors in a bunch,
though not exactly according to schedule. For
next morning there were so many descendants and
great-grandsons in the police court to prefer
charges that it looked like a reunion of the
Pilgrim Fathers. The Judge fined Hank on sixteen
counts and bound him over to keep the peace for a
hundred years. That afternoon he left for the
West on a special, because the Limited
didn’t get there quick enough. But before
going he tacked on the front door of his house a
sign which read:
"Neighbors
paying their party calls will please not heave
rocks through windows to attract attention. Not
in and not going to be. Gone back to Circle City
for a little quiet.
"Yours truly,
"HANK SMITH.
"N.B.--Too
swift for your uncle."
Hank dropped by my
office for a minute on his way to ‘Frisco.
Said he liked things lively, but there was
altogether too much rough-house on Beacon Hill
for him. Judged that as the crowd which
wasn’t invited was so blamed sociable, the
one which was invited would have stayed a week if
it hadn’t slipped up on the date. That might
be the Boston idea, but he wanted a little more
refinement in his. Said he was a pretty free
spender, and would hold his end up, but he hated
a hog. Of course I told Hank that Boston
wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be in
the school histories, and that Circle City
wasn’t so tough as it read in the
newspapers, for there was no way of making him
understand that he might have lived in Boston for
a hundred years without being invited to a
strawberry sociable. Because a fellow cuts ice on
the Arctic Circle, it doesn’t follow that
he’s going to be worth beans on the Back
Bay.
I simply mention
Hank in a general way. His case may be a little
different, but it isn’t any more extreme
than lots of others all around you over there and
me over here. Of course, I want you to enjoy good
society, but any society is good society where
congenial men and women meet together for
wholesome amusement. But I want you to keep away
from people who choose play for a profession. A
man’s as good as he makes himself, but no
man’s any good because his grandfather was.
Your affectionate
father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
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