The deal unfolded only gradually to my eyes.  (Naiveté' was ever my forte'!).  Now that I think on it, I don't think I was ever just hired outright to do a job by anyone anywhere: always Fate has dictated that I show up in time to play a pawn in someone else's melodrama - but so be it.  There was the time, yet far in the future at the date of these events - when I first went  to work in a New York advertising agency and found I had been hired as a pimp's assistant!  But of that another time...

    But what transpired in the below stairs intrigues of the Cleworth empire was that George - Editor-in-Chief and Sr. VP and partner to "Bill" Cleworth, who really owned the firm - had earlier pitched a favorite idea of his for a new magazine (or "book" as I was to learn they were called in the trade) to Cleworth - and Cleworth nixed the idea.  This aborted new trade magazine was to be in the industrial pattern and model field - an adjunct to the iron and steel production magazines serving industry.

    It was to be named Modern Patternmaking.  I had not known it during my "interview" but my presence solely as a warm body had presented George with a way to make his dream come true:  he would hire me as another editor and launch his brainchild surreptitiously - from across the street!

    That is, George and Ruthie (more later) lived in Iturbi Towers - an apartment house across the street from the publishing company offices.  They had cleared out a corner  in the cellar (very dark, very dank) and my desk and chair and filing cabinet (newly arrived from the Drinkwater Auctions up the Post Road in Cos Cob - of which much more later) were ensconced there!  While everyone else went to the office in the morning - including George who left his apartment and ambled over, I came late (by request) and eased myself into the apartment as George was departing - and clumped downstairs to my dungeon.

    I was, however, on the payroll across the street as one more editor in the 'stable' and the plan was that - young turk that I was - I would soon have a panting (industrial!) readership out there athirst for news about the foundry pattern field - and then George could spring the "book" as a defacto success and achievement on Bill Cleworth who would smile and pat him on the back and - drinks all 'round!

    And so it went - for awhile.  But Cleworth was as cagey in his way as his erstwhile partner - and Cleworth smelled a rat!  So it transpired that the secret was out - and all parties to the great deception were hailed into the "Boss's Office" on the top floor.  Fact was, MPM was a success almost from day one and was earning its way the second issue! (George, remember, knew how to 'Get Everything Working!').  Since you can't argue with success - not even an old stiff like Bill Cleworth - which he really was: George Rhine was the eyes, ears, and most of all the brains of that entire organization - things were smoothed over (smokehouse style, you might say) and Bill 'lowed as how it made most sense if I moved up out of the cellar and into the office where I belonged, and we drop all this subterfuge about MP and put it on the company masthead.

    And that's how I came to be Managing Editor of a full-blown technical magazine, less than one month after being forced to give up my marine salvage business.... Ah! Fortune beckoned in those days - and the world seemed truly my oyster...

    But, before I tell you how I had yet to acquire  the requisite knowledge of  the foundry and pattern fields needed to be the leading industry spokesman for them (such is the awesome reputation of those of us who have labored in the Fourth Estate) - I must relate an anecdote dating to my formal arrival in the company's editorial pool. Chuck and I shared an office - and about the second day or so - Chuck, who rarely spoke one word more than absolutely necessary to the occasion, turned around at his desk and said,

    "Bernie, I just wanted to tell you something: stay out of swapping deals with Pop".

    "Swapping deals?" said I.  "What swapping deals?  What do you mean?"

    "I mean that, like as not, when Friday comes 'round and they are handing out the paychecks, Pop will probably stick his head in the door and offer to swap you something - I dunno - anything.  Swap you that is, in lieu of the paycheck.  My advice to you is just stick to the paycheck and no swapping deals.  That way you'll be okay.  But if you get into swapping..."

    He trailed off in mid-air (his wont) and resumed his work at his desk.

    Two days later and apropos of nothing - and in the middle of nothing - he swiveled around again and said,

    "...then there'll be no end of it."

    And he swiveled back.  What he had done as I was to learn in time, was complete a typical Rhine 'thought' or communication: the whole family was like that: they would stop in the middle of a thought or sentence, turn on their heels and be gone.  You might see them next hour, next day, next month, or even years down the road, and without the batting of an eye or the slightest lapse they would complete the exact phrase they had stopped on in mid-air so long before!  They were a remarkable clan.

    And, would you believe, a day or so later, here came George with the paychecks.

    "How you fellas doin'?" he said - handing Chuck his check.  Chuck, always just a jump and a half ahead of an army of creditors, was out the door in a flash.

    "Well, Bernie - I see by your work you are a 'natural'.  Knew you were when I interviewed you.  (Natural 'what' I wondered:  listener?).

"Listen, Bernie -how you fixed for a wristwatch?"  (Oh! oh!, thought I - here it comes!)

    "Gee!  Mr. Rhine... I'm doing great here... got my old army watch still - still runs fine" (sticking wrist forward).

    "Well, then," says George (believe me, gentle reader: this is all true!) - pause -

    "How'd you and that pretty little Eye-talian wife of yours like a ... goat?"

    "A goat?  A real live goat, Mr. Rhine?  Gee - I dunno.  I think a goat - well, I don't think so".

    "Keep 'em in the backyard" says George.  "Make great pet.  Why, soon you and your Eye-talian wife'll have kids (much twinkle in eyes)... then just think ... you can milk the goat, and ... and... you can make a little cart and ride your  kids around the block and all...".

  I was starting to sweat a bit.

    "Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Rhine - I don't think I really want a goat.  Or a wristwatch or anything like that at all."

    (Silence).  Then the check - offered slowly.  I took it - gratefully.

    "Well... I see you and Chuck been talkin' and all.  Glad you're buddies."

    And he was gone.

    "Swapping" was life's blood to George, as I was to learn.  In fact, though he was soon at home with the citizens and their life ways of the Northeast and was amicably "...skimming some off as Life flowed by...", George always lamented the local lack of interest in 'swapping'.  Cash, as these urban folk mostly preferred, was for him the medium of the faint-hearted.  Give him a good  old American 'swap' any day and he'd take his chances!

    "Many's the time," he used to boast, "when I was your age, I would start out in the morning with nothing but an old pocketknife with maybe two blades missing, and by evening I'd have me an old fliver or something equal, say - just from "swappin' up".  (One such fliver having been further improved for the next day's swapping deals by judicious packing of its transmission with sawdust and a little stove blacking in its body dents...).