To Your Good Health
By Samantha Mazzotta
High Blood
Pressure Takes Toll on Body
DEAR DR. DONOHUE:
I have high blood pressure, or so I am told. I
don’t have a single symptom. I feel quite
well, and I am quite active. My doctor has
started me on medicine, and the thought of having
to take pills makes me sicker than the thought of
having high blood pressure does. What would be
the harm in putting off treatment until I can
tell that something is wrong? -- A.H.
ANSWER: That would
be foolish in the extreme. High blood pressure
never has any symptoms when it first starts.
That’s what makes it dangerous. When
symptoms arise, irreparable damage has occurred.
Hypertension --
high blood pressure -- is the most common chronic
illness in Canada and the United States. At least
one-third of adults have it.
Untreated high
blood pressure sets people up for heart attacks
and strokes. It accelerates artery hardening. It
leads to kidney and heart failure. It is one
cause of dementia. All of these consequences are
preventable by control of pressure.
The definition of
high blood pressure has recently changed. Normal
pressure now is one that is less than 120 over
80. Pressures of 120 to 139 over 80 to 89, once
thought of as being normal, are now called
prehypertension. People whose pressure is in
these ranges need to take action by reducing salt
intake, losing weight, exercising and limiting
the use of alcohol. Smoking has to stop.
Pressures above
140 over 90 often must be treated with the above
life changes and often with medicines. Taking a
pill or two a day is not much of a price to pay
for not having a heart attack or stroke.
LETTERS
from
a
SELF-MADE
MERCHANT
to his
SON.
by George Horace
Lorimer
First
published October, 1902
No.3
FROM John Graham,
at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son,
Pierrepont, at Harvard University.
Mr. Pierrepont finds Cambridge
to his liking, and has suggested that he take a
post-graduate course to fill some gaps which he
has found in his education.
III
June 1, 189_
Dear Pierrepont: No, I can’t say that I think
anything of your post-graduate course idea.
You’re not going to be a poet or a
professor, but a packer, and the place to take a
post-graduate course for that calling is in the
packinghouse. Some men learn all they know from
books; others from life: both kinds are narrow.
The first are all theory; the second are all
practice. It’s the fellow who knows enough
about practice to test his theories for
blow-holes that gives the world a hove ahead, and
finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it.
There’s a
chance for everything you have learned, from
Latin to poetry, in the packing business, though
we don’t use much poetry here except in our
street-car ads, and about the only time our
products are given Latin names is when the State
Board of Health condemns them. So I think
you’ll find it safe to go short a little on
the frills of education; if you want them bad
enough you’ll find a way to pick them up
later, after business hours.
The main thing is
to get a start along right lines, and that is
what I sent you to college for. I didn’t
expect you to carry off all the education in
sight - I knew you’d leave a little for the
next fellow. But I wanted you to form good mental
habits, just as I want you to have clean,
straight physical ones. Because I was run through
a threshing machine when I was a boy, and
didn’t begin to get the straw out of my hair
till I was past thirty, I haven’t any
sympathy with a lot of these old fellows who go
around bragging of their ignorance and saying
that boys don’t need to know anything except
addition and the "best policy" brand of
honesty.
We started in a
mighty different world, and we were all ignorant
together. The Lord let us in on the ground floor,
gave us corner lots, and then started in to
improve the adjacent property. We didn’t
have to know fractions to figure out our profits.
Now a merchant needs astronomy to see them, and
when he locates them they are out somewhere near
the fifth decimal place. There are sixteen ounces
to the pound still, but two of them are wrapping
paper in a good many stores. And they’re
just as many chances for a fellow as ever, but
they’re a little gun shy, and you can’t
catch them by any such coarse method as putting
salt on their tails.
Thirty years ago,
you could take an old muzzle-loader and knock
over plenty of ducks in the city limits, and
Chicago wasn’t Cook County then, either. You
can get them still, but you’ve got to go to
Kankakee and take a hammerless along. And when I
started in the packing business it was all
straight sailing - no frills - just turning hogs
into hog meat - dry salt for down South and
sugar-cured for up North. Everything else was
sausage, or thrown away. But when we get through
with a hog nowadays, he’s scattered through
a hundred different cans and packages, and
he’s all accounted for. What we used to
throw away is our profit. It takes doctors,
lawyers, engineers, poets, and I don’t know
what, to run the business, and I reckon that
improvements which call for parsons will be
creeping in next. Naturally, a young man who
expects to hold his own when he is thrown in with
a lot of men like these must be as clean and
sharp as a hound’s tooth, or some other
fellow’s simply going to eat him up.
The first college
man I ever hired was old John Durham’s son,
Jim. That was a good many years ago when the
house was a much smaller affair. Jim’s
father had a lot of money till he started out to
buck the universe and corner wheat. And the boy
took all the fancy courses and trimmings at
college. The old man was mighty proud of Jim.
Wanted him to be a literary fellow. But old
Durham found out what every one learns who gets
his ambitions mixed up with number two red - that
there’s a heap of it lying around loose in
the country. The bears did quick work and kept
the cash wheat coming in so lively that one
settling day half a dozen of us had to get under
the market to keep it from going to everlasting
smash.
That day made
young Jim a candidate for a job. It didn’t
take him long to decide that the Lord would
attend to keeping up the visible supply of
poetry, and that he had better turn his attention
to the stocks of mess pork. Next morning he was
laying for me with a letter of introduction when
I got to the office, and when he found that I
wouldn’t have a private secretary at any
price, he applied for every other position on the
premises right down to office boy. I told him I
was sorry, but I couldn’t do anything for
him then; that we were letting men go, but
I’d keep him in mind, and so on. The fact
was that I didn’t think a fellow with
Jim’s training would be much good, anyhow.
But Jim hung on - said he’d taken a fancy to
the house, and wanted to work for it. Used to
call by about twice a week to find out if
anything had turned up.
Finally, after
about a month of this, he wore me down so that I
stopped him one day as he was passing me on the
street. I thought I’d find out if he really
was so red-hot to work as he pretended to be;
besides, I felt that perhaps I hadn’t
treated the boy just right, as I had delivered
quite a jag of that wheat to his father myself.
"Hello,
Jim," I called; "do you still want that
job?"
"Yes,
sir," he answered, quick as lightning.
"Well, I tell
you how it is, Jim," I said, looking up at
him - he was one of those, lazy-moving
six-footers - "I don’t see any chance
in the office, but I understand they can use
another good, strong man in one of the loading
gangs."
I thought that
would settle Jim and let me out, for it’s no
joke lugging beef, or rolling barrels and tierces
a hundred yards of so to the cars. But Jim came
right back at me with, "Done. Who’ll I
report to?"
That sporty way of
answering, as if he was closing a bet, made me
surer than ever that he was not cut out for a
butcher. But I told him, and off he started
hot-foot to find the foreman. I sent word by
another route to see that he got plenty to do.
I forgot all about
Jim until about three months later, when his name
was handed up to me for a new place and a raise
in pay. It seemed that he had sort of abolished
his job. After he had been rolling barrels a
while, and the sport had ground down one of his
shoulders a couple of inches lower than the
other, he got to scheming around for a way to
make the work easier, and he hit on an idea for a
sort of overhead railroad system, by which the
barrels could be swung out of the storerooms and
run right along into the cars, and two or three
me do the work of a gang. It was just as I
thought. Jim was lazy, but he had put the house
in the way of saving so much money that I
couldn’t fire him. So I raised his salary,
and made him an assistant time-keeper and
checker. Jim kept at this for three or four
months, until his feet began to hurt him, I
guess, and then he was out of a job again. It
seems he had heard something of a new machine for
registering the men, that did away with most of
the timekeepers except the fellows who watched
the machines, and he kept after the
Superintendent until he got him to put them in.
Of course he claimed a raise again for effecting
such a saving, and we just had to allow it.
I was beginning to
take an interest in Jim, so I brought him up into
the office and set him to copying circular
letters. We used to send out a raft of them to
the trade. That was just before the general
adoption of typewriters, when they were still in
the experimental stage. But Jim hadn’t been
in the office plugging away at the letters for a
month before he had the writer’s cramp, and
began nosing around again. The first thing I knew
he was sicking the agents for the new typewriting
machine on to me, and he kept them pounding away
until they had made me give them a trial. Then it
was all up with Mister Jim’s job again. I
raised his salary without his asking for it this
time, and put him out on the road to introduce a
new product that we were making - beef extract.
Jim made two trips
without selling enough to keep them working
overtime at the factory, and then he came into my
office with a long story about how we were doing
it all wrong. Said we ought to go for the
consumer by advertising, and make the trade come
to us, instead of chasing it up.
That was so like
Jim that I just laughed at first; besides, that
sort of advertising was a pretty new thing then,
and I was one of the old-timers who didn’t
take any stock in it. But Jim just kept plugging
away at me between trips, until finally I took
him off the road and told him to go ahead and try
it in a small way.
Jim pretty nearly
scared me to death that first year. At last he
had got into something that he took an interest
in - spending money - and he just fairly wallowed
in it. Used to lay awake nights, thinking up new
ways of getting rid of the old man’s
profits. And he found them. Seemed as if I
couldn’t get away from Graham’s
Extract, and whenever I saw it I gagged, for I
knew it was costing me money that wasn’t
coming back; but every time I started to draw in
my horns Jim talked to me, and showed me where
there was a fortune waiting for me just around
the corner.
Graham’s
Extract started out by being something that you
could make beef-tea out of - that was all. But
before Jim had been fooling with it a month he
had got his girl to think up a hundred different
ways in which it could be used, and had
advertised them all. It seemed there was nothing
you could cook that didn’t need a dash of
it. He kept me between a chill and a sweat all
the time. Sometimes, but not often, I just had to
grin at his foolishness. I remember one picture
he got out showing sixteen cows standing between
something that looked like a letter-press, and
telling how every pound or so of Graham’s
Extract contained the juice squeezed fro a heard
of steers. If an explorer started for the North
Pole, Jim would send him a case of Extract, and
then advertise that it was the great heat-maker
for cold climates; and if some other fellow
started across Africa he sent him a case, too,
and advertised what a bully drink it was served
up with a little ice.
He broke out in a
new place every day, and every time he broke out
it cost the house money. Finally, I made up my
mind to swallow the loss, and Mister Jim was just
about to lose his job sure enough, when the
orders for Extract began to look up, and he got a
reprieve; then he began to make expenses, and he
got a pardon; and finally a rush came that left
him high and dry in a permanent place. Jim was
all right in his way, but it was a new way, and I
hadn’t been broad-gauged enough to see that
it was a better way.
That was where I
caught the connection between a college education
and business. I’ve always made it a rule to
buy brains, and I’ve learned now that the
better trained they are the faster they find
reasons for getting their salaries raised. The
fellow who hasn’t had the training may be
just as smart, but he’s apt to paw the air
when he’s reaching for ideas.
I suppose
you’re asking why, if I’m so hot for
education, I’m against this post-graduate
course. But habits of thought ain’t the only
thing a fellow picks up at college.
I see you’ve
been elected President of your class. I’m
glad the boys aren’t down on you, but while
the most popular man in his class isn’t
always a failure in business, being as popular as
that takes up a heap of time. I noticed, too,
when you were home Easter, that you were running
to sporty clothes and cigarettes. There’s
nothing criminal about either, but I don’t
hire sporty clerks at all, and the only part of
the premises on which cigarette smoking is
allowed is the fertilizer factory.
I simply mention
this in passing. I have every confidence in your
ultimate and good sense, and I guess you’ll
see the point without my elaborating with a meat
ax my reasons for thinking that you’ve had
enough college for the present.
Your affectionate
father,
John Graham
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