Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1943)

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gess Meredith, after a bout with the Hoosac Preparatory School, entered Amherst on a scholarship. He didn't graduate. He didn't even come close to graduating. His life at Amherst was a miserable failure. Harassed on the one hand by financial difficulties (to remedy which he washed dishes, tended furnace and minded babies) and throttled on the other by the snobbery and class-consciousness of the scions of the New England Brahmins who overran the school, it was inevitable that he should acquire that melancholy strain which he has never quite managed to shake off. He fought back by turning into Meredith the debonair, who could turn a jest or a tumbler of beer with equal ease. BY THE end of the year his mind was made up. Hopelessly in debt and oppressed by what he was to call later his "continuous blundering sadness," he would quit Amherst. He had not the vaguest idea what he planned to do two days before he terminated his life at Amherst. In fact, he didn't have the vaguest idea of his destination, for an obvious reason: His total assets amounted to eighty cents. He was sitting there in his room, his trunk packed, and reading the college paper when his eye fell upon an intriguing item. On the following afternoon a declamation contest for freshmen was to be run off, an unattractive announcemet indeed except for one little detail — the sum of $50 was to go to the winner. With only a few hours to prepare his material, he entered the contest, after staying up all night to memorize the memorable last scene of "Cyrano de Bergerac." The judges never left the room to compare notes. Even the contestants knew he had won. It was a buoyant Burgess Meredith who departed Amherst in search of his destiny. The boys who hung out the signs hadn't let him down. He had turned around in his mind the merits of the different professions and decided he would give reporting a try. So he trekked to Stamford, Connecticut, convinced the editor of the Advocate that he had just missed being named Pulitzer Prize journalist by a mere hair when he worked on the Los Angeles Times, and was straightway hired. For several weeks he managed to ward off his doom. But when he returned from an assignment involving a sensational suicide without having bothered to obtain the victim's name, he was fired right then and there. Seized with the sudden inspiration that maybe he was destined to become a merchant prince, he hurried home to Cleveland, where the Meredith boys opened up a haberdashery store. It wasn't long before the marshal arrived with hammer, nails and official documents. On that occasion, one of Meredith's best friends — the kind who are supposed to tell you whether you need that wonderful mouth wash or not — got it off his chest. "It beats me how Cleveland's sloppiest pair of dressers would dare go into the haberdashery business," he allowed. "I'll swear it does." One month later the frustrated merchant prince was selling neckties at Macy's, a job which he handled in a vague sort of fashion, so vague that often he made change out of his own pocket and forgot to pay himself back. It was only a matter of weeks before he was bounced. On the way home from his latest set FEBRUARY, 1943 Nothing's too good for you, my fad— not even FELSNAPTHA SOAP You're definitely White House material, and you're going into training for it — right now! Especially the 'white' part. Everything you wear is going to be washed with Fels-Naptha Soap. You'll be so shining clean you'll think I've bought you a new dress every day. And don't try to laugh that one off, young fellow. You don't know how lucky you are to be starting life in a Fels-Naptha home. N. B. — You're in luck too, Mother. You're using the finest Fels-Naptha Soap ever made. Milder, quicker-sudsing. Yet — Bar or Chips — priced as low as ordinary soaps. Golden bar or Golden chips. FELSNAPTHA banishesTattle-Tale Gray" 75