The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [153]
They were reluctant to ask Uncle Willis, because nobody ever believed anything that Uncle Willis said, but they had nowhere else to turn, so they asked Uncle Willis and he told them that a gross was a dozen dozen. They thought that was unbelievable, but they sat down on the store porch and counted up on their fingers, trying to figure out what a dozen dozen were. Since they each had only ten fingers, it was difficult to count up to a dozen, and get another dozen on top of that. Uncle Willis watched them for as long as he could stand it, which was pretty long, and then he took from his storeroom a cardboard carton marked “One Gross, White Thread” and gave it to them and told them to count the spools, which they did, finding that there were 144 spools. Emelda and Bevis went home and counted the dolls, and discovered that there were 432 male dolls and 432 female dolls. They divided these into piles of 144 each, and discovered that they had exactly six gross of dolls. Emelda hated to see them go, but she could always make more. They shipped the six gross off to St. Louis and received in return the woman’s check for $216. Although John’s bank had failed and he could not cash the check for them, he decided to reopen the bank and let them deposit their check and draw upon it as they needed. John had never given up hope of reopening his bank; he still subscribed to and faithfully read The Bankers’ and Investors’ Weekly; I doubt if his conscience was troubled at all by the fact that he was enabled to reopen his bank by a deposit from the same son whom he had denied permission to withdraw his savings years before.
Bevis Ingledew took his wagon and drove around to all of the farms in Stay More, buying cornhusks for 5¢ a bushel. No one thought him crazy, because word had quickly spread of Emelda’s talent for converting cornhusks into money, and most of the other women were dying to learn her secret, but Emelda pulled down all the shades in all her windows and arranged her four sons into an assembly line, and together, with Bevis guarding the exterior of the house to ward off peepers, they turned out cornhusk dolls by the thousand, and shipped them off to St. Louis, and made a fantastic lot of money, more than they knew what to do with, so much more that they were easily persuaded by John, whose bank they practically owned now, to invest it. John faithfully read The Bankers’ and Investors’ Weekly, and he had dreamed for years of dabbling in securities analysis or becoming a “Customer’s Man,” but he had no potential customers until his own son Bevis had more money than he knew what to do with. He took Bevis’s surplus money and sent it off to a brokerage office in Little Rock and invested it in those issues which The Bankers’ and Investors’ Weekly recommended as growth stocks, and sure enough they grew and grew. It mattered naught that their growingest stock was General Electric although they had never seen electricity and did not believe in it. They made so much money in the stock market that John’s commissions from this one customer were enough for a full salary, and John was thinking of renovating his bank, while Emelda telepathically pestered Bevis to build a larger and finer house for them. John began to pay attention to those issues which The Bankers’ and Investors’ Weekly classified as “high risk speculative ventures,” investment in which was practically gambling, but John began to gamble, and to win. One stock in particular, Poupée Industries Inc. of St. Louis, was particularly attractive, and John bought more and more shares of it, and it continued to rise, until it was one of the highest priced stocks on the under-the-counter market, and Bevis and Emelda owned practically all of it. A lavishly printed annual stockholders’ report was mailed to them, and they discovered