Cheaper by the Dozen (17 page)

"Now, I want you to stay here until you feel good and strong. Get a good rest; it's the first rest you've had since the children started coming." And then in the same breath: "I'll certainly be glad when you're back home. I can't seem to get any work accomplished when you're not there."

Mother thought the hospital was marvellous. "I would have to wait until my dozenth baby was born to find out how much better it is to have them in a hospital. The nurses here wait on me hand and foot. You don't know what a comfort it is to have your baby in the hospital."

"No," said Dad, "I don't. And I hope to Heaven I never find out!"

What Mother liked best about the hospital, although she didn't tell Dad, was the knowledge that if she made any noise during the delivery, it didn't matter.

When Dad finally drove Mother and Jane home, he lined all of us up by ages on the front porch. Jane, in her bassinet, was at the foot of the line.

"Not a bad-looking crowd if I do say so myself," he boasted, strutting down the line like an officer inspecting his men. "Well, Lillie, there you have them, and it's all over. Have you stopped to think that by this time next year we won't need a bassinet any more? And by this time two years from now, there won't be a diaper in the house, or baby bottles, or play pens, or nipples— when I think of the equipment we've amassed during the years! Have you thought what it's going to be like not to have a baby in our room? For the first time in seventeen years, you'll be able to go to bed without setting the alarm clock for a two o'clock feeding."

"I've been thinking about that," said Mother. "It's certainly going to be a luxury, isn't it?"

Dad put his arm around her waist, and tears came to her eyes.

Later that summer, when company came to call, Dad would whistle assembly and then introduce us.

"This one is Anne," he'd say, and she'd step forward and shake hands. "And Ernestine, Martha..."

"Gracious, Mr. Gilbreth. And all of them are yours?"

"Hold on, now. Wait a minute." He'd disappear into the bedroom and come out holding Jane. "You haven't seen the latest model."

But some of the enthusiasm had gone out of his tone, because he knew the latest model really was the last model, and that he would never again be able to add the clincher, which so embarrassed Mother, about how another baby was underway.

Next to motion study and astronomy, photography was the science nearest to Dad's heart. He had converted most of the two-story barn in Montclair into a photographic laboratory. It was here that Mr. Coggin, Dad's English photographer, held forth behind a series of triple-locked doors. Children made Mr. Coggin nervous, particularly when they opened the door of his darkroom when he was in the middle of developing a week's supply of film. Even in front of Dad and Mother, he referred to us as blighters and beggars. Behind their backs, he called us 'orse thieves, bloody barsteds, and worse.

At one time, shortly after Dad had had an addition built on our cottage at Nantucket, he told Mr. Coggin:

"I want you to go up there and get some pictures of the ell on the house."

"Haw," said Mr. Coggin. "I've taken many a picture of the 'ell
in
your 'ouse. But this will be the first time I've taken one of the 'ell
on
your 'ouse."

When Mr. Coggin departed after the unfortunate debacle concerning our tonsils, a series of other professional cameramen came and went. Dad always thought, and with some justification, that none of the professionals were as good a photographer as he. Consequently, when it came to taking pictures of the family, Dad liked to do the job himself.

He liked to do the job as often as possible, rain or shine, day or night, summer or winter, and especially on Sundays. Most photographers prefer sunlight for their pictures. But Dad liked it best when there was no sun and he had an excuse to take his pictures indoors. He seemed to have a special affinity for flashlight powder, and the bigger the flash the more he enjoyed it.

He'd pour great, gray mountains of the powder into the pan at the top of his T-shaped flash gun, and hold this as far over his head as possible with his left hand, while he burrowed beneath a black cloth at the stern of the camera. In his right hand, he'd hold the shutter release and a toy of some kind, which he'd shake and rattle to get our attention.

Probably few men have walked away from larger flashlight explosions than those Dad set off as a matter of routine. The ceilings of some of the rooms in Montclair bore charred, black circles, in mute testimony to his intrepidity as an exploder. Some of the professional photographers, seeing him load a flash gun, would blanch, mutter, and hasten from the room.

"I know what I'm doing," Dad would shout after them irritably. "Go ahead, then, if you don't want to learn anything. But when I'm through, just compare the finished product with the kind of work you do."

The older children had been through it so often that, while somewhat shellshocked, they were no longer terrified. It would be stretching a point to say they had developed any real confidence in Dad's indoor photography. But at least they had adopted a fatalistic attitude that death, if it came, would be swift and painless. The younger children, unfortunately, had no such comforting philosophy to fall back on. Even the Latest Model was aware that all hell was liable to break loose at any time after Dad submerged under the black cloth.They'd behave pretty well right up to the time Dad was going to take the picture. Then they'd start bellowing.

"Lillie, stop those children from crying," Dad would shout from under the black cloth. "Dan, open your eyes and take your fingers out of your ears! The idea! Scared of a little flash! And stop that fidgeting, all of you."

He'd come up in disgust from under the cloth. It was hot under there, and the bending over had made the blood run to his head.

"Now stop crying, all of you," he'd say furiously. "Do you hear me? Next time I go under there I want to see all of you smiling."

He'd submerge again. "I said stop that crying. Now smile, or I'll come out and give you something to cry about. Smile so I can see the whites of your teeth. That's more like it."

He'd slip a plate holder into the back of the camera.

"Ready? Ready? Smile now. Hold it. Hold it. Hooold it."

He'd wave the toy furiously and then there'd be an awful, blinding, roaring flash that shook the room and deposited a fine ash all over us and the floor. Dad would come up, sweaty but grinning. He'd look to see whether the ceiling was still there, and then put down the flash gun and go over and open the windows to let out a cloud of choking smoke that made your eyes water.

"I think that was a good picture," he'd say. "And this new flash gun certainly works fine. Don't go away now. I want to take one more as soon as the smoke clears. I'm not sure I had quite enough light that time."

For photographs taken in the sunlight, Dad had a delayed-action release that allowed him to click the camera and then run and get into the picture himself before the shutter was released. While outdoor pictures did away with the hazard of being blown through the ceiling, they did not eliminate the hazards connected with Dad's temper.

The most heavily relied upon prop for outdoor pictures was the family Pierce Arrow, parked with top down in the driveway.

Once we were seated to Dad's satisfaction, he would focus, tell us to smile, click the delayed-action release, and race for the driver's seat. He'd arrive there panting, and the car would lurch as he jumped in. When conditions were ideal, there would be just enough time for Dad to settle himself and smile pleasantly, before the camera clicked off the exposure.

Conditions were seldom ideal, for the delayed-action release was unreliable. Sometimes it went off too soon, thus featuring Dad's blurred but ample stern as he climbed into the car. Sometimes it didn't go off for a matter of minutes, during which we sat tensely, with frozen-faced smiles, while we tried to keep the younger children from squirming. Dad, with the camera side of his mouth twisted into a smile, would issue threats from the other side about what he was going to do to all of us if we so much as twitched a muscle or batted an eyelash.

Occasionally, when the gambling instinct got the better of him, he'd try to turn around and administer one swift disciplinary stroke, and then turn back again in time to smile before the camera went off. Once, when he lost the gamble, an outstanding action picture resulted, which showed Dad landing a well-aimed and well-deserved clout on the side of Frank's head.

Any number of pictures showed various members of the family, who had received discipline within a matter of seconds before the shutter clicked, looking anything but pleasant in the swivel seats of the car. The swivel seat occupants received most of the discipline, because they were the easiest for Dad to reach, and no one liked to sit there when it was picture taking time.

Sometimes newspaper photographers and men from Underwood and Underwood would come to the house to take publicity pictures. Dad would whistle assembly, take out his stopwatch, and demonstrate how quickly we could gather. Then he would show the visitors how we could type, send the Morse code, multiply numbers, and speak some French, German, and Italian. Sometimes he'd holler
"fire"
and we'd drop to the floor and roll up in rugs.

Everything seemed to go much smoother when Dad was on our side of the camera, for now he, too, was ordered where to stand, when to lick his lips, and, occasionally, to stop fidgeting. The rest of us had no trouble looking pleasant after the photographer lectured Dad. In fact we looked so pleasant we almost popped.

"Mr. Gilbreth, will you please stand still? And take your hands out of your pockets. Move a little closer to Mrs. Gilbreth, No, not that close. Look. I want you right here." The photographer would take him by the arm and place him. "Now try to look pleasant, please."

"By jingo, I am looking pleasant," Dad finally would say impatiently.

"I can't understand one thing," a man from Underwood and Underwood told Dad one time after the picture-taking was over. "I've been out here several times now. Everything always seems to be going fine until I put my head under the black cloth to focus. Then, just as if it's a signal, the four youngest ones start to cry and I can never get them to stop until I put the cloth out of sight."

"Is that a fact?" was all the information Dad volunteered.

Dad had a knack for setting up publicity pictures that tied in with his motion study projects. While he was working for the Remington people, there were the newsreels of us typing touch system on Moby Dick, the white typewriter with the blind keys. Later, when he got a job with an automatic pencil company, he decided to photograph us burying a pile of wooden pencils.

We were in Nan tucket at the time. Tom Grieves built a realistic-looking black coffin out of a packing case. For weeks we bought and collected wooden pencils, until we had enough to fill the coffin.

We carried the casket to a sand dune between
The Shoe
and the ocean, where Dad and Tom dug a shallow grave. It was a desolate, windswept spot. The neighbors on the Cliff, doubtless concluding that one of us had fallen down and had had to be destroyed, watched our actions through binoculars.

Dad set up a still camera on a tripod, connected the delayed-action attachment, and took a series of pictures showing us lowering the coffin into the grave and covering it with sand.

"We'll have to dig up the coffin now and do the same thing all over again so we can get the movies," Dad said. "We're going to hit them corning and going with this one."

We dug, being careful not to scratch up the coffin, and then sifted the sand from the pencils. Tom cranked the movie camera while we went through the second funeral. Fortunately, it was before the days of sound movies, because Dad kept hollering instructions.

"Turn that crank twice a second, Tom. And one and two and three and four. Get out from in front of the camera, Ernestine. Marguerite Clark and Mary Pickford have things pretty well lined up out there, you know. Now then, everybody pick up the shovels and heave in the sand. Look serious.This is a sad burial.The good are often interred with their bones. So may it be with pencils. And one and two and..."

When we were through with the second funeral, Dad told us we'd have to dig up the coffin again.

"You're not going to take any more pictures, are you?" we begged. "We've taken the stills and the movies."

"Of course not," said Dad. "But you don't think we're going to waste all those perfectly good wooden pencils, do you? Dig them up and take them back into the house. They should last us for years."

In justification to Dad, it should be said that automatic pencils always were used once the supply of wooden ones was exhausted. Dad simply couldn't stand seeing the wooden ones wasted.

The next summer, when Dad was hired as a consultant by a washing machine company, we went through the same procedure with the washboard and hand-wringer at Nantucket. This time, though, Tom was prepared.