The Pleasure Was All Mine by Fred Schwed Jr.

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The Notes

• Published in 1951. Schwed was in his 40s.
• “Looking back on my career, I observe that I have enjoyed a most temperate success as a writer and breadwinner, while my bridge game, my golf game, and my personal daintiness have occasionally been adversely commented on. These achievements do not add up to much of a career.”
• “I have always complained that the advice of editors, publishers, and literary agents tends to be eloquent rather than helpful. I begin to appreciate why this is.”
• “The most overworked expression in present day English is ‘inferiority complex.’”
• “I view myself today — a fat man with a tendency to be lonely if there are only five people present and with a fondness for meeting large masses of utter strangers. I look back on a slender lad who was almost abjectly grateful to his few friends for their friendship, and who preferred to tiptoe away from strangers.”
• “The great trouble with adolescence is that when you are in it you’re so young. As a result you rarely know within a wild brassie shot how anything is going to turn out.”
• “The beloved fathers of beloved boys are also perhaps half their adversaries, while they are still living. This is sad, but I do not think that very much can be done about it, since so little has been done since Bible times.”
• His father was stock trader and promoter — a curb broker — on Wall Street. He made a fortune and lost everything more than once and never had the sense to stop trading after he made fortune.
• “The securities business, when indulged in judiciously, the way Pop mostly did, is a moderately profitable, moderately dull business. The same securities business when indulged in injudiciously, the way Pop occasionally did, is high and thrilling adventure. That is the reason why the business is sometimes engaged in injudiciously.”
• “Was it a gift that fate bestowed on Pop, or a shabby trick that fate played on him? She gave him the gift of glamorous success when he was a young man, and then after a span of years took the gift back. This sequence of events is the most distressing sequence; yet there must be many, who never tumbled but who never first soared either, who envy him his mixed career.”
• “Consider…how many other people are inclined to listen to how statements ring upon the ear rather than what sense they make.”
• “…the silly thing men do lives after them (because it usually makes the better copy — remember Fred Merkle?) while the sensible is oft interred with their bones.”
• Schwed was kicked out of college his senior year. He says it wasn’t for grades or blowing up the chemistry lab.
• “The combined odds on the various horses in a race that a professional bookie will lay are always unfair to the bettor, and that just how unfair they are can be determined to a decimal point. From this, a sure prediction can be made: if a person will only bet on the horses often enough and long enough he will eventually lose all his money. My brothers and I understood the case so clearly that we have ever since considered the betting window in a class with the dental parlor. Funny thing about Pop; he could teach that lesson so well, but he couldn’t learn it.”
• “I have long been completely convinced that when they say that racing ‘improves the breed,’ what they are referring to is the breed of horses, not the breed of horse players.”
• His father bought a racing stable during one of his bouts of wealth.
• “By the way, here is a useful tip for the reader. If you ever have the opportunity to acquire a small racing stable, do not grasp it.)
• “…the middle of Broad Street, which was filled every weekday, in all weathers, with horse dung, English sparrows, and New York Curb Exchange brokers. The excitement there was intense, and it was a healthy life if you didn’t catch pneumonia. In those halcyon days, when the Curb was alfresco it was said (I think by Wilson Mizner) that the two chief rules were ‘Don’t cut commissions’ and ‘No smoking opium while the market is open.’ It has never been satisfactorily explained to me why the Curb ever went indoors and became respectable. Maybe it had to do with rising prices for common shares, or maybe it had to do with the passing of the horse.”
• Election betting once flourished on the exchange floor. Schwed’s father was one of the bookmakers who took bets before elections, until he no longer had the capital to do it anymore.
• His father, when he was low on cash, would issue sight drafts — pieces of paper that look like bank check but was only cashable at his father’s office.
• “In all the windows facing Broad Street men leaned out and made frantic cabalistic gestures with their fingers, like mutes engulfed in a catastrophe.”
• “Down in Broad Street, from ten till three, there was a crowd of men acting out what looked like a controlled riot. They were not all owners of ‘seats’ and those who did own seats had even less opportunity to for sitting down than seat owners at the near-by Stock Exchange.”
• On Penny Mining Stocks: “These stocks represent gold mine properties nesting about the vicinity of the Arctic Circle. They are first attractively priced at, say, thirty-five cents per share but have a tendency to stabilize later at, say, eight cents a share.”
• “One of Pop’s admirers claimed he was the only man in The Street who could throw a telephone and put a curve on it.”
• His father worked as a war correspondent during WWI for a New York paper. He was posted in England and Europe to send back dispatches.
• “When a family income is badly bruised there is a choice of two things for the family to do. One is Pop’s choice, which is to go as though nothing had happened because things are going to get better. The other is the coward’s choice, or my choice, which is to give up the battle promptly and start saving money.”
• His father’s losses eventually included the house, forcing the family to move to a small apartment.
• “The Great Depression, if you care to remember, was almost as dull as it was dreadful. Pop managed to find a single shallow draft of comfort from the situation. ‘In the mad race for riches,’ he confided to me, ‘we are not forging ahead to challenge those who gallop in the van. On the other hand, a lot of night-blooming poops of my acquaintance are rapidly falling back to join us.’”
• “I have heard many stirring tributes in song and story to mothers. Strangely, one priceless attribute is seldom mentioned — the endearing talent of being able to turn, with warm eager eyes and sincere fascination, from one blabber-mouth to the other.”
• “It does not take much talent to have social engagements. Beauty of form and face is not mandatory and I can prove it.”
• “I am familiar with all the good, old jokes, just as familiar as Bennett. After one decade in Wall Street and another with the swivel tongued cognoscenti, you normally have to go back to the eighteenth century to surprise me.”
• “How remarkably easy it is to look a long way backward, and, with assured sarcasm, survey a situation. From the other end of the telescope things weren’t so clear.”
• “The value of a college education — ‘the worth-while-ness,’ to use the popular and ungainly expression — is about as debatable a matter as exists. There is, for instance, Economics I, which I passed, and which scarcely prepared me for the shenanigans I later encountered on Wall Street when I went to work there.”
• On Sports: “In times like the twenties, when many people acquired money by picking it off trees instead of working for it, a peculiar transposition takes place. People like to do something that is difficult. So they go in for play with such grim earnestness that the play becomes hard and exacting work.”
• “A man can transmit only such information as he knows; he can do no more. Let me assure the reader that I know far more than most know and that it isn’t enough.”
• “The best way of learning about women is to marry one, and this I have done. (Marrying several times implies no extra knowledge. It merely indicates that the student has flunked the course several times and has had to take it over.)”
• “There is an ancient adage which everybody knows — take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves. This happens to be a bum among ancient adages… Actually, the thing to take care of is the hundred dollars, or the thousand dollars, or, preferably, the million dollars. If you use some foresight and restraint with those sums, the pennies will take care of themselves.”
• “It was in my early twenties that I discovered something that the majority of people never do discover (thank heavens). I discovered — I know not how — that you do not have to be issued a special license to bid a roomful of guest to fall temporarily silent while you address them on some point; all that is required is a tone of load confidence. Later I found that a tone of quiet confidence works even better.”
• “In the field of physical exercise and sport it weas recognized thirty years ago that we were becoming a nation of spectators — that instead of playing games ourselves we were nearly all, in serried ranks of tens of thousands, buying tickets to watch a handful of experts perform.”
• “The highest level of all conversation is to teach and to learn, to seek wisdom and grace — not in the loneliness of the library or the onanistic course of a correspondence school, but in the mutually warming society of friends.”
• “It is generally not appreciated what a large segment of chitchat is hopefully earmarked for giggles. Statistics show that in communities of more than three thousand persons, forty-five percent of all remarks made by persons over the age of fifteen are intended to be in some degree amusing.”
• “There are several important rules for the formal humorous recital. Important as they are, these rules are not followed: (1) The narrator should know how to tell a joke. If he doesn’t know how, it is no use practicing up. he should take up something else, like pulling people’s hats down over their eyes. (2) He should know which jokes to tell to which people, and (3) he should know which jokes to tell to nobody and (4) he should know when not tell any jokes to anybody, such as at divine services or on the station platform in the early morning.”
• “The rise and fall of our family’s fortunes never followed particularly closely the rise and fall of the other people’s fortunes.”
• “It seems that when a depression comes along, the man who knows about it first is not a financial expert, it is an actor. Unemployment hits the second oldest profession the way darkness hits a contained chamber when the last candle gutters out.”
• Schwed’s family had a butler once at the early part of the Great Depression. Turned out the butler was an actor (out of work and needed a job), who bet a fellow actor, that he could keep a job as a butler for a certain period of time. He won. He quit after he got a part in a play.

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