Cheaper by the Dozen (11 page)

Grandma averred she was a great believer in "spare the rod and spoil the child." Her own personal rod was a branch from a lilac bush, which grew in the side lawn. She always kept a twig from this bush on the top of her dresser.

"I declare, you're going to catch it now," she would say. "Your mother won't spank you and your father is too busy to spank you, but your grandma is going to spank you till your bottom blisters."

Then she would swing the twig with a vigor which belied her years. Most of her swings were aimed so as merely to whistle harmlessly through the air. She'd land a few light licks on our legs, though, and since we didn't want to hurt her feelings we'd scream and holler as if we were receiving the twenty-one lashes from a Spanish inquisitor. Sometimes she'd switch so vigorously at nothing that the twig would break.

"Ah, you see? You were so bad that I had to break my whip on you. Now go right out in the yard and cut me another one for next time. A big, thick one that will hurt even more than this one. Go along now. March!"

On the infrequent occasions when one of us did become sick enough to stay in bed, Grandma and Dad thought the best treatment was the absent treatment.

"A child abed mends best if left to himself," Grandma said, while Dad nodded approval. Mother said she agreed, too, but then she proceeded to wait on the sick child hand and foot.

"Here, darling, put my lovely bed jacket around your shoulders," Mother would tell the ailing one. "Here are some magazines, and scissors and paste. Now, how's that? I'm going down to the kitchen and fix you a tray. Then I'll be up and read to you."

A cousin brought measles into the house, and all of us except Martha were stricken simultaneously. Two big adjoining bedrooms upstairs were converted into hospital wards—one for the boys and the other for the girls. We suffered together for two or three miserable, feverish, itchy days, while Mother applied cocoa butter and ice packs. Dr. Burton, who had delivered most of us, said there was nothing to worry about. He was an outspoken man, and he and Dad understood each other.

"I'll admit, Gilbreth, that your children don't get sick very often," Dr. Burton said, "but when they do it messes up the public health statistics for the entire state of New Jersey."

"How come, Mr. Bones?" Dad asked.

"I have to turn in a report every week on the number of contagious diseases I handle. Ordinarily, I handle a couple of cases of measles a week. When I report that I had eleven cases in a single day, they're liable to quarantine the whole town of Montclair and close up every school in Essex County."

"Well, they're probably exceptionally light cases," Dad said. "Pioneer stock, you know."

"As far as I'm concerned, measles is measles, and they've got the measles."

"Probably even pioneers got the measles," Dad said.

"Probably so. Pioneers had tonsils, too, and so do your kids. Really ugly tonsils.They ought to come out."

"I never had mine out."

"Let me see them," Dr. Burton ordered.

"There's nothing the matter with them."

"For God's sake don't waste my time," said Dr. Burton. "Open your mouth and say 'Ah.' "

Dad opened his mouth and said "Ah."

"I thought so," Dr. Burton nodded. "Yours ought to come out, too. Should have had them taken out years ago. I don't expect you to admit it, but you have sore throats, don't you? You have one right this minute, haven't you?"

"Nonsense," said Dad. "Never sick a day in my life."

"Well, let yours stay in if you want. You're not hurting anybody but yourself. But you really should have the children's taken out."

"I'll talk it over with Lillie," Dad promised.

Once the fever from the measles had gone, we all felt fine, although we still had to stay in bed. We sang songs, told continued stories, played spelling games and riddles, and had pillow fights. Dad spent considerable time with us, joining in the songs and all the games except pillow fights, which were illegal. He still believed in letting sick children alone, but with all of us sick—or all but Martha, at any rate—he became so lonesome he couldn't stay away.

He came into the wards one night after supper, and took a chair over in a corner. We noticed that his face was covered with spots.

"Daddy," asked Anne, "what's the matter with you? You're all broken out in spots."

"You're imagining things," said Dad, smirking. "I'm all right."

"You've got the measles."

"I'm all right," said Dad. "I can take it."

"Daddy's got the measles, Daddy's got the measles." Dad sat there grinning, but our shouts were enough to bring Grandma on the run.

"What's the matter here?" she asked. And then to Dad: "Mercy sakes, Frank, you're covered with spots."

"It's just a joke," Dad told his mother, weakly.

"Get yourself to bed. A man your age ought to know better. Shame on you."

Grandma fumbled down her dress and put on her glasses. She peered into Dad's face.

"I declare, Frank Gilbreth," she told him, "sometimes I think you're more trouble than all of your children. Red ink! And you think it's a joke to scare a body half to death. Red ink!"

"A joke," Dad repeated.

"Very funny," Grandma muttered as she stalked out of the room. "I'm splitting my sides."

Dad sat there glumly.

"Is it red ink, Daddy?" we asked, and we agreed with him that it was, indeed, a very good joke. "Is it? You really had us fooled."

"You'll have to ask your grandma," Dad sulked. "She's a very smart lady. She knows it all."

Martha, who appeared immune to measles, nevertheless wasn't allowed to come into the wards. She couldn't go to school, since the house was quarantined, and the week or two of being an "only child" made her so miserable that she lost her appetite. Finally, she couldn't stand it any more, and sneaked into the sick rooms to visit us.

"You know you're not allowed in here," said Anne. "Do you want to get sick?"

Martha burst into tears. "Yes," she sobbed. "Oh, yes."

"Don't tell us you miss us? Why, I should think it would be wonderful to have the whole downstairs to yourself, and to be able to have Mother and Dad all by yourself at dinner."

"Dad's no fun any more," said Mart. "He's nervous. He says the quiet at the table is driving him crazy."

"Tell him that's not of general interest," said Ern.

It was shortly after the measles epidemic that Dad started applying motion study to surgery to try to reduce the time required for certain operations.

"Surgeons really aren't much different from skilled mechanics," Dad said,"except that they're not so skilled. If I can get to study their motions, I can speed them up. The speed of an operation often means the difference between life and death."

At first, the surgeons he approached weren't very cooperative.

"I don't think it will work," one doctor told him. "We aren't dealing with machines. We're dealing with human beings. No two human beings are alike, so no set of motions could be used over and over again."

"I know it will work," Dad insisted. "Just let me take some moving pictures of operations and I'll show you."

Finally he got permission to set up his movie equipment in an operating room. After the film was developed he put it in the projector which he kept in the parlor and showed us what he had done.

In the background was a cross-section screen and a big clock with "GILBRETH" written across its face and a hand which made a full revolution every second. Each doctor and nurse was dressed in white, and had a number on his cap to identify him. The patient was on an operating table in the foreground. Off to the left, clad in a white sheet, was something that resembled a snow-covered Alp. When the Alp turned around, it had a stopwatch in its hand. And when it smiled at the camera you could tell through the disguise that it was Dad.

It seemed to us, watching the moving pictures, that the doctors did a rapid, business-like job of a complicated abdominal operation. But Dad, cranking the projector in back of us, kept hollering that it was "stupidity incorporated."

"Look at that boob—the doctor with No. 3 on his cap. Watch what he's going to do now. Walk all the way around the operating table. Now see him reach way over there for that instrument? And then he decides that he doesn't want that one after all. He wants this one. He should call the instrument's name, and that nurse—No. 6, she's his caddy—should hand it to him. That's what she's there for. And look at his left hand—dangling there at his side. Why doesn't he use it? He could work twice as fast."

The result of the moving picture was that the surgeons involved managed to reduce their ether time by fifteen per cent. Dad was far from satisfied. He explained that he needed to take moving pictures of five or six operations, all of the same type, so that he could sort out the good motions from the wasted motions. The trouble was that most patients refused to be photographed, and hospitals were afraid of law suits.

"Never mind, dear," Mother told him. "I'm sure the opportunity will come along eventually for you to get all the pictures that you want."

Dad said that he didn't like to wait; that when he started a project, he hated to put it aside and pick it up again piecemeal whenever he found a patient, hospital, and doctor who didn't object to photographs. Then an idea hit him, and he snapped his fingers.

"I know," he said. "I've got it. Dr. Burton has been after me to have the kids' tonsils out. He says they really have to come out. We'll rig up an operating room in the laboratory here, and take pictures of Burton."

"It seems sort of heartless to use the children as guinea pigs," Mother said doubtfully.

"It does for a fact. And I won't do it unless Burton says it's perfectly all right. If taking pictures is going to make him nervous or anything, we'll have the tonsils taken out-without the motion study."

"Somehow or other I can't imagine Dr. Burton being nervous," Mother said.

"Me either. I'm going to call him. And you know what? I feel a little guilty about this whole deal. So, as conscience balm, I'm going to let the old butcher take mine out, too."

"I feel a little guilty about the whole deal, too," said Mother. "Only thank goodness I had mine taken out when I was a girl."

Dr. Burton agreed to do the job in front of a movie camera.

"I'll save you for the last, Old Pioneer," he told Dad. "The best for the last. Since the first day I laid eyes on your great, big, beautiful tonsils, I knew I wouldn't be content until I got my hands on them."

"Stop drooling and put away your scalpel, you old flatterer you," said Dad. "I intend to be the last. I'll have mine out after the kids get better."

Dr. Burton said he would start with Anne and go right down the ladder, through Ernestine, Frank, Bill, and Lillian.

Martha alone of the older children didn't need to have her tonsils out, the doctor said, and the children younger than Lillian could wait awhile.

The night before the mass operation, Martha was told she would sleep at the house of Dad's oldest sister, Aunt Anne.

"I don't want you underfoot," Dad informed her. "The children who are going to have their tonsils out won't be able to have any supper tonight or breakfast in the morning. I don't want you around to lord it over them."

Martha hadn't forgotten how we neglected her when she finally came down with the measles. She lorded it over us plenty before she finally departed.

"Aunt Anne always has apple pie for breakfast," she said, which we all knew to be perfectly true, except that sometimes it was blueberry instead of apple. "She keeps a jar of doughnuts in the pantry and she likes children to eat them." This, too, was unfortunately no more than the simple truth. "Tomorrow morning, when you are awaiting the knife, I will be thinking of you. I shall try, if I am not too full, to dedicate a doughnut to each of you."

She rubbed her stomach with a circular motion, and puffed out her cheeks horribly as if she were chewing on a whole doughnut. She opened an imaginary doughnut jar and helped herself to another, which she rammed into her mouth.

"My goodness, Aunt Anne," she said, pretending that that lady was in the room, "those doughnuts are even more delicious than usual."... "Well, why don't you have another, Martha?"... "Thanks, Aunt Anne, I believe I will."... "Why don't you take two or three, Martha?"... "I'm so full of apple pie I don't know whether I could eat two more, Aunt Anne. But since it makes you happy to have people eat your cooking, I will do my best."

"Hope you choke, Martha, dear," we told her.

The next morning, the five of us selected to give our tonsils for motion study assembled in the parlor. As Martha had predicted, our stomachs were empty. They growled and rumbled.We could hear beds being moved around upstairs, and we knew the wards were being set up again. In the laboratory, which adjoined the parlor, Dad, his movie cameraman, a nurse, and Dr. Burton were converting a desk into an operating table, and setting up the cross-section background and lights.

Dad came into the parlor, dressed like an Alp again. "All right, Anne, come on." He thumped her on the back and smiled at the rest of us. "There's nothing to it. It will be over in just a few minutes. And think of the fun we'll have looking at the movies and seeing how each of you looks when he's asleep."

As he and Anne went out, we could see that his hands were trembling. Sweat was beginning to pop through his white robe. Mother came in and sat with us. Dad had wanted her to watch the operations, but she said she couldn't. After awhile we heard Dad and a nurse walking heavily up the front stairs, and we knew Anne's operation was over and she was being carried to bed.

"I know I'm next, and I won't say I'm not scared," Ernestine confided. "But I'm so hungry all I can think of is Martha and that pie. The lucky dog."

"And doughnuts," said Bill. "The lucky dog."

"Can we have pie and doughnuts after our operations?" Lill asked Mother.

"If you want them," said Mother, who had had her tonsils out.

Dad came into the room. His robe was dripping sweat now. It looked as if a spring thaw had come to the Alps.