Sometimes he was known as “Old Man Kav,” and it is to the credit of the latter that he coaxed every new arrival in the office to work extra the first day or night as the case might be for “Old Man Kav” without compensation. “Old Man Kav” may have been a myth but he was an expensive one to the new arrivals. There never was so much sickness or dire distress attached to anyone compared with the excuses advanced by “Old Man Kav” to work the new comers or rather introduce them to the New York fraternity, persuading them by carefully worded notes to work for him.
The New York force was large and it necessarily had its quota of cranks. When they became generally known as such their lives were made, to say the least, unhappy at times. John Lenhart frequently found the desk at which he worked fumigated with limburger cheese, but who performed the ceremony no one could ever find out.
Every new man on the force was instructed by note signed “Old Man Kav” to hand his worn-out pens and penholders to irritable Tom Kennedy, the wire chief, but to discover who issued such instructions was more than the office detective could find out.
No married operator in the New York force thirty or forty years ago was considered first-class until he had purchased in one of the suburban New Jersey or Long Island towns a home of his own. It was not a difficult task to him to figure how six good laying hens could yield a sufficient number of eggs, the profit on which would pay for his home in five years. One of these lightning calculating operators had drummed up quite a few customers for his fresh-laid eggs. He brought them to the office each morning, hid them away until noon, when he delivered them to his customers. It did not take long, “Old Man Kav” said, for him to size up the hen merchant’s tricks. He speedily made arrangements with a local egg dealer to furnish him with a few dozen eggs that had seen better days and some previous years. As the fresh eggs arrived each morning and the unsuspecting owner was busy at his wire, the old-time product was substituted for the strictly fresh variety. The reader can imagine the nature of the language that was exchanged during the following week between the embryo egg merchant and his customers, some of whom were officials of the company, more vividly than anything we can say. The office detective again failed to locate the guilty party and the egg merchant speedily went out of business.