Joe Lyendecker is designing covers in color for paper-bound novels. They are gorgeous. There are no art magazines or other publications helpful to designers. You, like others, have a scrap-book made up of booklet covers, cards and other forms of advertising. A designer by the name of Bridwell is doing some thrilling work for Mathews Northrup in Buffalo, a concern that is setting a stiff pace for other railroad printers. Abbey, Parsons, Smedley, Frost and Pennell, and Charles Graham in _Harper’s Weekly_, are models for all illustrators.
You are now free-lancing and making designs for Mr. Kasten of the McClurg stationery department. You have a studio in the new Caxton building on Dearborn Street. You work all of one day and night and part of the next day on some drawings for Mr. Kasten. He comes to get them at four o’clock on the afternoon before Christmas. You tell him you haven’t eaten since the previous night.
He takes you and your drawings in a cab and stops at a saloon in the McVickar Theater building and buys you an egg nog. “Drink this,” he says. “It will put you on your feet until you reach home and can get dinner.” It is only a glass of milk and egg--and looks harmless. You get on the Madison Street horse-car, and take a seat up front. There is straw on the floor to keep your feet warm. You promptly go to sleep. The car bumps across some tracks and you wake long enough to know your stop is only two blocks away. In getting off the car the straw tangles your feet and you seem to be falling over everyone. The sidewalk is not wide enough for you. This being a new section, the planks are a foot or more above the ground. You walk in the road.
In these early Nineties no cash is needed to buy a printing outfit, just an agreement to pay a monthly installment. You buy a Golding press, a type-stand, a small stone and a few cases of Caslon and an English text. You are probably itching to play a little with printing. You do not find time to do more than lay the type. A letter comes from your wife’s sister in South Dakota. It states that a neighbor’s son or brother, or some near relative, is in Chicago, that he is interested in art, and it asks will you look him up. He is a bookkeeper and cashier in a ground-floor real-estate office at the corner of Clark and Dearborn. His name is Fred Goudy. He wants to get into the printing business, in a small way. You tell him of your small outfit and that he can have it and the benefit of payments made if he will assume future installments. He agrees.