Edna Ferber: Fanny Herself

8. CHAPTER EIGHT (continued)

"Oh, yes. And that reminds me. Bunch of fellows in the smoker last night talking about Haynes-Cooper. Your mother hated 'em like poison, the way every small-town merchant hates the mail-order houses. But I hear they've got an infants' wear department that's just going to grass for lack of a proper head. You're only a kid. And they have done you dirt all these years, of course. But if you could sort of horn in there--why, say, there's no limit to the distance you could go. No limit! With your brains and experience."

That had been the beginning. From then on the thing had moved forward with a certain inevitableness. There was something about the vastness of the thing that appealed to Fanny. Here was an organization whose great arms embraced the world. Haynes-Cooper, giant among mail-order houses, was said to eat a small-town merchant every morning for breakfast.

"There's a Haynes-Cooper catalogue in every farmer's kitchen," Molly Brandeis used to say. "The Bible's in the parlor, but they keep the H. C. book in the room where they live."

That she was about to affiliate herself with this house appealed to Fanny Brandeis's sense of comedy. She had heard her mother presenting her arguments to the stubborn farmer folk who insisted on ordering their stove, or dinner set, or plow, or kitchen goods from the fascinating catalogue. "I honestly think it's just the craving for excitement that makes them do it," she often said. "They want the thrill they get when they receive a box from Chicago, and open it, and take off the wrappings, and dig out the thing they ordered from a picture, not knowing whether it will be right or wrong."

Her arguments usually left the farmer unmoved. He would drive into town, mail his painfully written letter and order at the post-office, dispose of his load of apples, or butter, or cheese, or vegetables, and drive cheerfully back again, his empty wagon bumping and rattling down the old corduroy road. Express, breakage, risk, loyalty to his own region--an these arguments left him cold.