INDIANA
Toward the end of the war, I think, my father was becoming a little disillusioned regarding the glory of staying at home to feed the soldiers, as he seems to have been glad enough to escape during a couple of winters to go over into Indiana and clerk in a store in Bluffton, owned I think, in part at least, by his half-brother, George. The amount of his salary does not appear but I suspect it wasn't much. It was the only time in my father's life that he ever worked for salary. That his pay wasn't high is sustained in my mind by the fact that he carried to the end of his days an enduring prejudice against working for wages, except as a preliminary expedient, in order to learn the business. However, he managed to save enough so that, by adding it to other funds he had tucked away as he was coming along, he was able to muster about one thousand dollars when he was twenty-one, to go into partnership with two other young men and buy the store in which they were working, the other two planning to put up $2,500 each. My grandfather demonstrated that he was not without some traces of sagacity, deciding that he would rather lend "Jimmie" an additional $1,500 than he would see him go into a partnership in which he didn't own as large a share as the others. And so the firm of Arnold, Bliss and Arnold was launched, with three equal partners.
Father never dwelled much on his experiences in Bluffton - he was there for only a few years and probably thought that nothing of much importance happened. My knowledge of the events of the period is a little sketchy, not to say hazy. Out of the murk, however, rises one story that is worthy of a better pen than mine.