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Octavo, brown cloth (hardcover), 171 pp. Near-Fine. Containing passages on a man's wanderings across the United States, including Chapter Twenty-Three on an Indian Reservation and Chapter Seven, on the Miami, Florida, area: I ran into Cap'n Ely Pyne and his mate, Jonas Stull, in New Orleans where their schooner, the Pathfinder, was loading lumber for Florida. That was in the winter of 1926 when the Florida land boom was at its peak. With the Florida East Coast Railroad glutted with freight and an embargo declared, lumber wholesalers had turned to sail, and every hull that would float had been dragged off the mud and put into service. I was told that the PAthfinder was loading for Miami, and as I was heading for Florida myself I butted into these two old windjammer men in the hope of getting some late dope on the boom. They were standing on the dock when I hove to, watching the negro stevedores grunt and sweat with the last few thousand feet of the deck load. I landed a sales job with a Jacksonville lumber firm and rounded up in Miami, my headquarters-to-be, about a month later. But when I got to Miami I found I had made a serious mistake. I found I should have hooked up with a real-estate firm instead of a lumber concern. Not that I hadn't moved my share of lumber on my way down the coast. I had. But where I was drawing seventy-five a week, the real-estate salesmen in Miami were cleaning up thousands in commissions every day or so. I stood it as long as I could. For a whole week I peddled lumber while hearing on street corners, in hotel lobbies, banks, shops, restaurants, movie theaters, shine parlors, how this or that fellow had landed a whale of a fortune with just nerve for a hook and a shoestring for a line. But it finally got me. Sunday night at dinner my waiter informed me between the meat and fish course that he had made ten grand on a subdivision proposition near Coral Gables. He not only told me; he showed me a check for five thousand dollars. This was the last time he would ever wait on a table, he said. Monday he was going to open a real-estate office of his own. . American Biography, Texas, Florida, Americana, New York, U.S.-iana, Memoirs, Roaring Twenties, Great Depression, Indian Reservation, New Mexico. yslic.
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