Made In America
Descriptive Story of a
Purely American Industry
Raw Material, Labor,
Machinery and Everything
Connected with the Production
and Distribution American
ORIGINATED, MANUFACTURED,
CONSUMED IN U.S.A.
Wisconsin Pearl Button Co.
Head Office and Main Factory
La Crosse, Wisconsin
Six Representatives Covering
the Entire United States
Cutting Plants
Lake City, Minnesota
Cutting Plant
Guttenberg, Iowa
Office and Stock Room
377 Broadway, New York City
Office and Stock Room
Utuica . . . . N.Y.
D.W. MacWillie
President
Geo. W. Burton
Vice-President
P.A. Schwanzle
Secretary
The Story of My Life
by "Billie Button"
My name is Billie Button, and my
home is now at La Crosse, Wis-
consin, but I expect to make a trip
pretty soon and where I'll bring up Heaven
only knows. On the waist of Sidney
Christopher Sparks, at Punxsutawney,
Pennsylvania, maybe, or perhaps bedneck-
ing the dress of that little Lucille Dunwoody,
of Tulare, California, wears to her birth-
day party.
But while I am waiting for my call to start on the
succession
of journeys that will bring me to my final destination and
career
of usefulness, I've been asked by Mr. MacWillie, of the
Wisconsin
Pearl Button Company, to tell you the story of my life.
Now, I'm not a Kipling or an Ernest Seton-Thompson, but if
you'll be patient and let me spin my yarn in my own way, I
think
you'll find it interesting, for I don't believe you have
ever seen
anything just like it in print before.
Now for a fresh start. My name, as I told you, is Billie
Button
- of the Pearl-Button family, if you please, distantly
connected
with the Ivory-Buttons, the Bone-Buttons, and the
Brass-Buttons,
but with quite a different history, I assure you.
In telling you about us Pearl-Buttons I am going to go
clear
back to the beginning of things, in the days of Old Mother
Clam, on
the mud flats of the Mississippi. I'll have something to
say about
how the festive clam lives - or dies - how its shell gets
into the
button factory and what happens to it there. There will be
interesting
chapters on my experience in the big, modern plant of the
Wisconsin
Pearl Button Company, at La Crosse.
And while my adventures my not bring you all the chills
and
thrills that follow Deadwood Dick or Sherlock Holmes, I
believe
that you will find them sufficiently varied and
interesting to keep
you from napping and to make you look forward to each
successive
chapter with a real hankering.
See here, though, this isn't my story - it's only the
advance notice of it, written (in true fifteen cent
magazine
fashion) by the author. The real story will start with
next-month's
calendar.
The Story of My Life
by "Billie Button"
Chapter I. The author tells of his ancestry
and pedigree, with side-lights on the
habits of the care-free clam.
IN telling my story, I, Billie Button, must go back to the
time long
before I was I at all. Come with me, kind reader, to the
Mississippi
River, somewhere between Iowa and Wisconsin. Take
a peep beneath its waters a little way off shore. Clams -
Clams -
Clams - millions of them, waiting in a "bed" a mile or
more long,
with their faces turned upstream and their mouths open,
for the clam
"toils not, neither does he spin," but waits for the big
river to bring
his food right down into his jaws. Not the clams that make
your
mouth water at the famous Clam Bakes of Long Island Sound,
but
their cousins, the Fresh-Water-Clams.
High-sounding names they have in the mouths of the
scientific
gentlemen who write Fisheries Bulletins and Zoologies.
Take a
long breath before you tackle them: Lampsilis
Andontonoides,
Anodonta Corpulenta, Plagiola Donaciformis, Quadrula
Pustulata,
and a lot others that sound like the combatants in a
Sicilian
vendetta. Your clammer and longshore union, though, don't
bother with scientifc terminology, but dub them Slop
Bucket, Nigger
Head, Mucket, Pig Toe and other expressive if inelegant
nicknames.
Ask the clammer over there to show
you what his "crow foot" has brought up.
Look carefully at the dozen or so specimens
he dumps into your boat. Maybe they'll
all be of one family, or just as likely every
one will be different in appearance and name.
Pick up one and rip off its shell ruthlessly.
(What's a clam's feelings to the pursuit of knowledge?)
If it's breeding time and you have chanced on a mother
clam, you
will find the gills doing double duty, for besides
performing their
naturnal breathing functions they will be distended
(wholly or in
part) with a jelly-like mass containing thousands of the
tiny eggs,
becoming what the scientists call the "marsupium"
or brood pouch. If your specimen answers
to the name of Paper Shell or Lampsilis Laevissima,
these eggs will be pale or colorless. If
it chances to be a Quadrula Ebena, they will
be pink or bright red.
The Story of My Life
by "Billie Button"
Chapter II. Here you meet the Glochidium.
Don't be afraid of his name.
He is harmless.
Maybe the next clam you investigate will have no eggs at
all - then you can gamble that it is a father clam,
useful,
but with a history that, as Kipling says, "is another
story."
Number three opens up differently. The brood pouch is
full,
but not of eggs. Instead you'll see, if you look closely,
myriads
of little embryo clams or glochidia (how these professors
do love
to parade their Latin). These glochidia are hatched from
the eggs
in the brood pouch, but reMain there, packed snug and
tight, for
periods of from a few weeks to several months, according
to the
particular kind of clam from which they spring. The
glochidium is
tiny, of course, and its shell is soft, but it has all the
essential
featues of the adult clam, and in the brood pouch of the
old mother
clam its organs develop and it grows up toward perfect
clamhood.
Now drop the rest of your clams into
the bottom of your boat, row off down
stream and try your luck as an angler. If
fate is kind and bait attractive, you'll land
a brace of rock bass or a sheepsHead - at
worst you can count on pulling in a few sunfish.
What has that to do with clams?
Let's see.
Take a close look at that fish you caught last. Along its
fins
and gills you will find little rough bumps ans bunches -
all closed
over with "skin." Don't be suspicious. Mr. Fish isn't
diseased -
these are not boils or bunions, but another step in the
life history
of the clam, and a shining example of Dame Nature's way of
caring
for her helpless children.
When you open these bunches you will
find that each contains a glochidium just like
one of thsoe you saw in the clam's brood pouch
a half hour back, only a little better developed.
You have stumbled on the clam in its "parasitic"
stage.
The Story of My Life
by "Billie Button"
Chapter III. The clam's halcyon days - with
a forewarning of trouble.
The glochidium, when thrust out by the mother clam into
the
cold and cruel world, closes its embryo shell on the fins
or gills of the first fish that comes along, a sac or cyst
forms
about it, and it lives in this state for a few weeks,
during which time
it develops into a full fledged mussel. This doesn't hurt
the fish at
all, and is mighty beneficial to His Clamlets. The time
spent as a
parasite differs from two to six weeks, depending on the
particular
kind of clam that is making its way in the world.
Bye and bye the glochidium
gets tired of being dependent
upon other folk, opens
up the door of its house on
the fish's fin and drops off to
the bottom of the stream,
where it takes its place in the
clam bed as a fully developed,
(though not fully grown), clam, breathing and
sleeping, and keeping its mouth placidly open
for the generous food supply the old Mississippi
brings along. If the water is pure and runs rapidly, all's
well and
the clam thrives, but if a sewage system or factory pours
its polluting
waste into the stream, its existence is likely to be cut
prematurely
short.
"Very well," you say, "but is this the life story of a
Clam or
of a Pearl-Button?" Be patient, I'm coming to that, but
first I
must tell you how the clam's lot nowadays isn't so much a
soft snap
after all, how it's worried and flurried, hunted and
harried, and finally
dragged forth from its bed to a slaughter of the
innocents.
Here's how: For many years the calm from whose shell I
sprang lay in a Mississippi clam-bed, with millions of its
relatives.
There it staid, eating its fill and growing in
Summer, in Winter lying dormant; each year
of its liked marked by lines and grooves on its
shell. For the first few years it grew rapidly,
then slower and slower until -
One day, something happened.
The Story of My Life
by "Billie Button"
Chapter IV. A good thing that turned out badly.
The Clam's Calamity. Prizes of Pearls.
A long smack into its open mouth came something black that
looked like a luscious bite, so it closed down its shell.
But
somehow this bite didn't prove as toothsome as it seemed,
and pretty quick, "Whish, Whoosh" up it came, carrying the
clam
with it alongside a boat, and before slow-thinking Mr.
Clam could
let go, he was picked off and thrown down in the bottom of
the
boat, along with hundreds of others of his unsuspecting
family.
The seemingly tempting morsel was the hook of a "crow
foot."
"What IS a 'crow foot?'" Well, it's what clam fishermen
use in their
business. To make it they take an iron bar ten or fifteen
feet long and
fasten it to twenty strings with stout three pronged hooks
at the end of every
string. The bar floats along in the water and when the
clammer thinks he
has a good catch he simply draws it in, pulls up the lines
and takes off the
clams that have fastened themselves to the hooks. When
this particular
clam was caught, on most of the hooks on most of the
lines had a nice, fat clam hanging on for dear life.
Farewell to the contented idleness of the family Clam Bed
- farewell to
the generous feeding of the mighty river. My ancestor now
becomes a martyr
- not to science but to commerce.
When the clammers who caught him went ashore they dumped
their load
into a big vat of water, and built a hot enough fire under
it to kill their catch;
remorselessly, relentlessly, and chuckling with unholy
glee. In death the
clam's jaws relaxed and he opened up. Then with his
fellows he was thrown
upon a sieve and his meat searched for pearls, and
(tradition says) yielded
one of the big pearl finds of the season.
For pearls, as you may know, are the object of the
clammer's warfare on
the clam. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of them
are every year
taken from the clams of the Mississippi, and several
times single pearls valued at more than a thousand
dollars have been found. The clammer, however,
believes in utilizing the by-products, and after throwing
away the clam meat or selling it to the neighboring
farmers to feed their hogs, starts the shells on their way
to the button factory.
The Story of My Life
by "Billie Button"
Chapter V. A very important chapter, for it
chronicles the author's birth.
A few days before this calm I've been telling you about
was
dragged to its doom, a buyer for the Wisconsin Pearl
Button
Company, of La Crosse, Wisconsin, happened along and
gathered up samples of shells from this particular "bed."
At the
factory these samples went through searching tests for
color, lustre
and breakage, proving up so well that the buyer contracted
for the
season's shell output from the bed.
The Upper Mississippi Clam, by the way, yields a superior
grade of shell, for the changes of the Northern Climate
make it rugged
and vigorous. Its character reflects the stern and
upbuilding experiences
of northern climes. Let other buttons trace their source
to the
Arkansas or the Wabash. I am proud that I got my start "Up
North."
In the carload, with my progenitor, were
hundreds of different kinds and grades of shells.
But no two of these can be cut precisely alike,
so, as soon as the factory is reached, in steps
an army of sorters, keen-eyed judges of family
likenesses, and presently every kind and size
of shell in the car has found its way to a bin
filled with its "nearest-like" relatives.
And here's where my own life story really begins.
"Once upon a very fine day," as the story
book says, the Head "cutter" called for the
particular grade of shells to which my ancestral
clam shell belonged. For a week it had
been preparing with his fellows for the ordeal
in which its identity was to be lost and
mine begun - soaking in a vat of water to
make it tougher and less brittle. But finally up to the
cutting room it went.
Here a man specially trained in cutting this one kind of
shell seized it, put it
on a lathe beneath a little cylindrical saw, applied the
power, and - b-z-z!, the miracle had been wrought - I
was born.
Not yet, however, was I full fledged button -
only a blank - one of hundreds of the same size,
with dozens of other sizes and grades dropping out
of machines all around.
The Story of My Life
by "Billie Button"
Chapter VI. My education begins and
I become a Real Button.
I soon found out that however much human babies are
coddled, baby buttons have a perilous time of it. My
development to maturity was as strenuous as it was swift.
With other blanks from the same cutter I first passed
through the
sorting machine, where five different thicknesses of
blanks are automatically
separated from one another. Away next to the grinding
machine - severe kindergarten for infant buttons - where
the rough
clam shell "bark" is taken off by revolving emery wheels.
On then,
"rig-a-jig-jig-and-away-we-go" to a sort of big churn
affair partly
filled with water, in which we blanks bump against one
another
and the water until our rough edges are worn down smooth.
It's
good for us, but worse drubbing than when you get in a
Turkish
bath. After this experience our stay in the drying
machine,
where all the moisture is taken out of our systems, seems
like the
Seventh Heaven.
Now comes a most important step in
my life. I am about to be advanced from my
novitate as a "blank" into full orders as a
real, bona-fide, honest-to-goodness button.
This initiation takes place in the "Automatic"
Room, where a wonderful machine gives us
three degrees in quick succession.
First our edges are rounded off by sharp
steel chisels beneath which we pass. Then
zip-biff, a depression is cut in our middles,
and zzt-zzt, sharp steel bits cut in our button-
holes - four of them for me, as you've seen
by my picture, two for some of my cousins. At last I am a
really
unmistakable Pearl-Button.
There are forty machines for advancing us from blanks into
buttons in this room at the factory, and from
twenty-five hundred to three thousand of us
take the degree every minute of the working day.
But my education isn't over. Iv'e got to
acquire a lot of things yet before I can go out
and fill my destined place in the world.
The Story of My Life
by "Billie Button"
Chapter VII. Here's where I show the stuff
that's in me, and get due Credit.
So away I am sent to the polishing room, where I get the
real acid
test. Into a large revolving barrel I go, plump into a
solution of
sulphuric acid, weak at first but gradually increased in
strength. Here's
where I get toughened to meet the hard knocks of later
life. My, how it "bites,"
but I have the satisfaction of knowing that the ordeal
will prepare me for
service, and for beauty as well, for pearl buttons, like
steel, have to be hardened
and tempered before they can take on a high gloss. An hour
and a half of
this, then two minutes in another biting bath of
hydrocholoric acid, which puts
on the gloss. Further details of my toilet follow thick
and fast - if any of the
acid were left on me, my good looks wouldn't last, so I am
drenched with
steam and water and shaken up vigorously in boxes
containing saw-dust,
which removes every trace of acid and leaves me
beautifully lustrous.
Next we Pearl-Buttons go to the Sorting Room. Here comes
the final
crucial test. If we have native weaknesses, they stand
revealed. If we have
failed to benefit
to the full by our
factory experiences,
our short-
comings are detected.
Sharp-
eyed girls with
deft fingers rapidly
sort us into
piles - First
Grade, Second
Grade, Third
Grade and
Fourth Grade.
Some of us, I
am sorry to say, meet the test so poorly that we are
thrown into the "defective"
pile as totally unfit for life's stern duties.
This story of my career is in its essential features like
that of every pearl
button that goes through the big Wisconsin Pearl Button
Company factory at
La Crosse. There are, of course, differences in grades and
sizes, and some
of us have to be bleached in the making, while others
simply won't bleach,
and become, by special processes, converted into
Smoked-Buttons. In a general
way, though, my experience is typical.
I was lucky enough to be classed as First Grade, and with
many of my
fortunate companions was sent into a La Crosse cottage,
where Hilda Swenson sewed me on an attractive paper
card, along with eleven others of my class. And here
I am in the stock room, back at the factory, waiting
my call to go out into the big busy world. I wonder
if it will be New York or Seattle for mine - or Detroit
or Natchez.
The Story of My Life
by "Billie Button"
Chapter VIII. About my Birthplace - and how they
do things in a big Button Factory.
I should be ungrateful indded if I told you only about
myself and
MY ANCESTRY, and didn't devote at least one chapter of my
life
story to my birthplace and home, the factory of the
Wisconsin
Pearl Button Company of La Crosse, Wisconsin.
This factory is a big, modern, industrial plant conducted
on broad-gauge
lines of scientific management. Its slogan is
"Efficiency." Every one of its
three hundred and fifty employees is imbued with the
spirit of accomplishment
and quality. These employees are picked workers, and
each of the mreceives special training in his or her
particular task before being
intrusted with a part in the production of the finished
button. This assures
in us who come from this factory a high standard of
quality that has made
the Wisconsin Pearl Button Company's output eagerly sought
by buyers who
know and demand the best in pearl buttons.
In this factory system and standardization are the big
ideas.
System cuts out waste in handling and manufacture, reduces
the labor required for
each operation to the minimum, and at the same time makes
every stroke of work count
big for quality. Standardization insures the perfect, even
finishing and grading of
the entire product.
All the clam shells that come into the factory are, as
I've told you, graded for species.
This enables each cutter to become an expert in his line,
for, by cutting only one kind of
shell, he acquires the ability to turn out the greatest
possible number of good blanks, and to
produce the highest possible quality of blanks at the
lowest possible price. All operations
in the factory are standardized and the employees are
trained to the high quality standard
upon which the notable prestige of the Wisconsin Pearl
Button
Company has been built up.
To obtain quality of production and quality in the
finished
product, the factory is equipped with automatic machinery
of
the most improved type. In the making room each of the
twenty-five button machines has a speed of 45 to 80
buttons per
minute. In the cutting room are batteries of lathes, on
each of
which several different sizes of buttons can be made by
simply
changing the saw, spool, or chuck.
The Story of My Life
by "Billie Button"
Chapter IX. How the Wisconsin Pearl Button
Company provides for the Well-being
of its Employees.
A complete record is made of every button produced in
the factory, and the percentages of each of the different
grades
is carefully checked. Double Inspection in the Grading
Room secures marvelous uniformity in each of the different
grades
("firsts," "seconds," "thirds," and "fourths") marketed.
In spite of its traffic with the murderous Clammers, the
Wisconsin
Pearl Button Company is a human and humane institution.
It believes in looking after the welfare of its employees;
sees that
they work under the best sanitary and moral conditions,
and have
the opportunity to participate fairly in the results of
their labor.
In all departments of the factorythe compensation of the
worker varies with amount of work per-
formed. The minimum wage scale paid is
ample for decent and comfortable living,
while increased production gets substantial
recognition in the weekly pay envelope.
Its liberal treatment of its workers has de-
veloped efficiency and quality in the highest
degree.
Here's how one example of the way in which
the progressive factory looks after the well-
being of its employees:
A miniature hospital ward, fully
equipped with all the necessary appliances, has been
fitted up at
the factory and placed in charge of a trained nurse.
Employees who
are taken ill or meet with accidents are cared for in this
ward at the
Company's expense. This nurse also examines all girls who
apply
for employment at the factory, to find out whether or not
they are
in physical condition for the work.
This Pearl-Button family of ours is a big family, I tell
you.
The Wisconsin Pearl Button Company sends
out ten different sizes of us, twelve different
patterns in both two-hole and four-hole bu-
ttons, and eight different grades. Take your
pencil and figure this out and you'll see that
right here there are over 1900 different branches
of our family tree.
The Story of My Life
by "Billie Button"
Chapter X. A Business that grows fast - and
an Industry that amounts to something.
"What becomes of the waste shell?" Oh, that is crushed,
bagged
up and shipped away to be used in making such useful
products
as chicken feed and fertilizers.
Every week twenty-five to thirty thousand gross of us
Pearl-Buttons have
the finishing touches put on our education. From the
factory we go all over
the country, from Maine to California, to Wholesale Dry
Goods and Notion
Houses, and to manufacturers of Shirts, Night Robes,
Dresses, Wrappers,
Waists, Aprons, Sweaters, and other garments.
The remarkable growth of the business of
the Wisconsin Pearl Button Company during
the past seven years shows that "quality counts"
in buttons as in everything else. For the year
ending July 1st, 1907, the output of the factory
was 237,400 gross, while the year ending July
1st, 1913, saw this swelled to the neat, round
total of 1,580,220 gross, while for the present
business year a production of 1,800,000 gross
is planned. What a string of pearl buttons
that would make. "Consistent delivery with
right prices," says Mr. MacWillie, "accounts
for this splendid increase."
We Pearl-Buttons, of the Fresh-Water branch of the family,
have worked
a revolution in the button business. New as our family is
(the Fresh-Water
Pearl-Button was practically unknown twenty-five years
ago), it has made
itself a power in the world's industrial life. In the past
twenty years we
have saved the users of pearl buttons over two hundred
millions of dollars,
for our aristocratic relatives, the Ocean Pearl-Buttons,
cost from twenty-five
cents a dozen up and weren't a bit better for practical
use in life than we are.
No longer must people pay high prices or content
themselves with poor, easily
breakable makeshifts of agate or bone. Fresh-Water
Pearl-Buttons can now
be used on even the least expensive garments. Thirty-seven
billion, five
hundred million of us went forth from the button factories
of America last
year. What do you think of that?
Our commercial importance is recognized by the big
National Association
of Pearl Button Manufacturers, including in its membership
over twenty
factories in seventeen different states. This organization
exercises a watchful,
if selfish, care over our clam-progenitors, for there's
danger that our family
history would be cut short if existing clam-beds were
relentlessly ravaged without anything being done to
renew the supply. So the Association has interested
the United States Fisheries Bureau in the protection
and artificial propogation of fresh-water mussels, and
a great deal of practical work is being done by fisheries
experts and scientists to keep up the supply.
The Story of My Life
by "Billie Button"
Chapter XI. Being the Epilogue, this is short
and ends happily.
Here, patient reader, is my Epilogue, the thing the
classy author always tacks on to his story to dispose
of his characters after the Wedding Bells and Rice.
When I laid down my pen I was at the factory, neatly
carded, expectantly waiting for something to turn up. It
has turned up. I'm at work in the world at last -
and how I traveled to get there. First
to the big home of a jobbing house in
Cincinnati, then (happily for my literary
ambitions) out to a store in a little
Indiana town. On then with the eleven
fellow journeyers on my "card" to a
pleasant home - off in an hour to the
dressmaker, where snip, off the card I
went, and skilful fingers sewed me fast
to a little girl's frock. There's where I
am right now, right in the heart and center
of James-Whitcomb-Rileydom, and Isabel's mamma says
I'm a mighty good Pearl-Button to stand the wear and
tear of schooldays and washdays the way I do.
But with becoming modesty I disclaim the credit for
the quality she praises, for this rightfully belongs to
the way
I was brought up and trained - back there in the Wisconsin
Pearl Button Company's factory at La Crosse.
