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By Root 498 0

about the district are a few large structures like the Jollity Building, but less imaginary, which are favorite camping grounds of the Indians because they contain large numbers of the telephone booths necessary to the tribe's survival. The Telephone Booth Indians are nomads who have not attained the stage of pastoral culture in which they carry their own shelter.* Like the hermit crab, the Telephone Booth Indian, before beginning operations, must find a habitation abandoned by some other creature, and in his case this is always a telephone booth. The numerical strength of the tribe is therefore roughly limited by the number of telephone booths in the district, as a sow's litter is by the number of her teats. Yet between the Telephone Booth Indian and the great man of the Indian's special world there is only the unessential difference between grub and worm. Instead of spending his working day looking at a coin box, the great man has from three to six telephones on his desk. In the land of the Telephone Booth Indians, according to the definition of my profound friend Izzy Yereshevsky, a successful man is one who knows how to get a dollar and the rest haven't got what to eat. All of the subjects of the sketches in this book come under one or the other heading. That is about all they have in common, but there is a good deal that some of them have in common with some of the others. Mr. Yereshevsky thinks that the Telephone Booth Indian is a key figure in our city and age. He has always refused to allow the installation of a telephone booth in the I. and Y. Cigar Store which he owns at Fortyninth Street and Seventh Avenue. “The store is open twentyfour hours a day,” he says, “so if I had a booth how would I get the guy out of it?”

The only subject of a piece in this book who does not at least make his business headquarters in the territory of the Telephone Booth Indians is Mr. Roy Howard, the publisher. He dresses like a Telephone Booth Indian's idea of a fellow who knows how to get a dollar, and he likes to use the telephone. However, the main reason that he is in this book is that we needed the 15,000 words.

The Author

*Example: Cheyenne, Sea Lapps, Bedawi, owners of trailers.

• Masters of the Midway •

ne of the most distinctive periodicals published in the land of the Telephone Booth Indians is called the Greater Show World, a trade paper for outdoor showmen. It is edited in one room in the Gaiety Building, which is not a fictional edifice, by a man named Johnny J. Kline who has five typewriters in his office and usually has a sheet of copy paper in each of them. When he sits at one typewriter he is editorinchief, at another he is business manager, and at a third a gossip columnist. He writes under different bylines as two other reporters at the remaining typewriters. The magazine which he gets out all by himself every month is just as big as the New Yorker, he reminds me whenever I see him, and he says he wonders what the hell the New Yorker staff does for a living. Since the advertising and editorial departments of the Greater Show World are lodged in adjacent wrinkles of the same brain lobe, they sometimes get telescoped, and the result is a spontaneous eulogy for an advertiser. Through the years a pair of showmen named Lew Dufour and Joe Rogers have drawn more eulogies and paid for more ads than almost anybody else. The pair never got a chance to work near Telephone Booth Indian territory until Grover Whalen opened his World of Tomorrow over in Flushing Meadows in 1939. When that happened they showed they knew how to get a dollar.

Among the shows on the World's Fair midway presented by the firm of Dufour & Rogers, one, “We Humans,” illustrated the grand strategy of evolution in a somewhat macabre fashion. A reverent, threedimensional presentation of Da Vinci's “Last Supper,” with lifesized models of the apostles, trick lighting effects, and a musical background of Gregorian chants supplied by a phonograph with an electrical recordchanging device, was to have been another Dufour & Rogers offering. They