MOOSEHEART MAGAZINE
Teach Your Boy a Trade
School. This is too rapid a thing to hope for; but while the world is waiting for such development we can do the next best thing, we can get the fathers and mothers of today, whose children are about them, to induce those children to head towards this splendid opportunity of the craftsman.
It is true that apprenticeship in trade opportunities are not as open as they were years ago. It is true too that specialization in all lines of life has very much contracted the path of progress of many individuals. It is time that our school culture does not yet hitch up profitably for the benefit of the hand worker. Our whole system of education steers as yet too much in preparedness for the so called professions. However, manual training schools, the supplement _ of experimental machine shops, printery rooms in connection with many High Schools of the country, offer the opportunities for specialization in trades. High Schools are opening up the way for the MOOSEHEART idea of education of the mind and hand. Then there are the great institutions that are offering the opportunities of Mooseheart to the lad who is heading toward the noble,. ancient and today the most opportune life of the craftsman. You need to count in these last efficient agencies that offer their help to the lad who wants to become a craftsman.
Fifteen years ago there was a young lad, the son of a minister, who was in charge of a parish in one of the suburban towns of Chicago. The father bought machinery toys for his boy, electrical devices, and things that called out the boy’s interest in wheels and wires and batteries. When the boy came to _ start in High School he began to weave wires in the shed and start batteries and make experiments, bought books on electricity. He matriculated at one of the many institutions, and outlined the operations of development of electrical hand work. On his own hook he ran the MOOSEHEART idea; he went to school for academic purposes and then devoted as much of the day as he could to getting his lesson from his vocational institution and experimenting• in his rude shed laboratory. That was some fifteen years ago. Eight years ag׳o we passed on one of the lines into Chicago a little brick building on whose side was indicated the work of a craftsman in electricity. Now there are acres covered by a large factory in which there is an electrical engineer scarcely twenty-eight years of age managing the whole, plant. He does not boast that he is a . self-made man. He gives credit to the toys his father bought him, to the extension schools with whom he corresponded and to his own determination to become a craftsman in electricity that need not be ashamed.
The thing that this boy has done is within the reach of any boy who will select a trade or craft of his liking and with his steadfastness, determination and American willfulness head in the direction that means his future welfare
Fathers and moth-
M	........ ers, you must get your
boys to like something along this craft line. Then you must keep them encouraged in its pursuit and buy all the helps that books and institutions and openings in apprenticeship avenues will keep him with fixedness of purpose in the way that he likes to and should go.
If it were possible (Continued on page 20)
By J. A. RONDTHALER, Dean
lever. By all means include in the trade department of life the farm and the ranch. The farmer of today certainly measures high up in the craft class. Recall the efforts of James Hill, the builder of the Northern Pacific, who sent out his stirring-appeal to the boys of the city and town to come out into the great, plains his road opened up, and “possess the land which the Lord our God has g'iven,” to American boyhood.
Now there is one thing that presses upon you as you dream of the coming years of this country, and sense the world of the future. It is the need of the right kind of man material for the immense opportunities that are before the world on the line of progressive civilization. It is not more ministers that will be needed in the next five, ten or twenty years, it is not many more lawyers that the world will call for. Quarrels, disputes, differences, fights will be more and more relegated to the scrap heap of the past. Doctors will always be needed,—but do not fear there will always be enough to munch around in blood and rattle the bones of the human body. But what the world will need in a short time, what it needs now is the men who can work deftly, invent rapidly, improve efficiently things, machines, houses, farms, everything that
THIS is Labor Day, September 1st, 1919. All over the country thousands are worshiping׳ in their own way at the altar of Labor. The handy man, or the man of the hand, makes up the great processions of the day. He is taking an outing to celebrate the Age of the Workman. Today the praying portion of the country unites in the petition of the centuries’ old Nintieth Psalm, “Pros-
is “made in America.” The cry of the world will more and more come to be for men who can work with their hands. So everybody wants to be patriotic for the future, and do what he can to promote the multiplication of the hand workers who will be needed the next five, ten and fifteen years to snap up the. greatest of all World opportunities for the
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still greater era of the hand worker, the artisan, the craftsman, the mechanic, the machinist, the farmer, the skilled workman.
Not only you who are already steaming along on the top of this great wave of development, not only do you want to say to the youth of today, “come and join us, head this way in your choice of vocation,” but fathers and mothers _ in thousands of families need to use
every argument, evei'y persuasion, every intense influence to have your boys thrill and bound in thought and will and purpose towards this great coming opportunity of the hand worker.
Sitting here at MOOSEHEART on this Labor Day, one naturally thinks of these seven hundred or more children who are here, nearly every one of them destined by the kind providence of MOOSEHEART towards one of the twenty-five trades that are offered_ and will be offered to them to turn them out in one year, three years, five years, ten years as crafts workmen “who need A§Lashamed.” One wishes that a hundred MOOSEHEARTS could be established to supply this world with craftsmen who shall be . ready to lay their hands to the implements of their profession on the day they graduate from the High
per Thou the work of our hands, yea the work of our hands prosper Thou it.” Is it a case of crass literalism to insist on putting emphasis on “hands,”, and say that it is the great prayer of the men with the trade ? The man who works at something that earns. Is there a Bible prayer that puts as much emphasis on any profession, — excepting perhaps the ministry,—as it does upon the prayer of the man who works with his hands. Stand up, you hand workers, you people who produce things with your hands, lift up your heads and look up and get the answer to that prayer. Why shall we say GET the answer? Have you not, yourselves, already worked out the answer? Prosperity! Where is the profession, the vocation, the calling, the work of any class or kind that has had and is having prosperity of your kind. Not perhaps as yet in a financial way—though you are making true progress in that direction,—but still greater progress in the broad domain of success. Measure that word “success” by the gauge of “getting there,” and you hand workers are “getting there.” These growing cities of buildings, this rolling machinery, these broad new roads of cement, these great farms; why almost everything you can see outside of God created nature is somewhere along the line, the result of hand work, the accomplishment of a trade.
You men with trades at your fingers’ ends have done it all. Brains! What shall we say,—that the hand worker is only a machine and needs no brains ? Why, there are hand workers by the thousands upon thousands who each use up as much brain force as any minister does to preach a sermon, as any lawyer does to plead a case, as any doctor does to cure a patient, as .any Statesman does to push through a public measure, or any politician does to put over a graft. Your brain work does not make a Cassius, lean and hungry, it gives you health of the body as no other class of brain workers enjoy. Your combination of hrain and hand may not clothe you in fine linen and soft wool and fancy necktie, but the spots on your working clothes are more honorable than any stick pin with diamond luster and when your day’s work is over you can don the stick pin and prance as gracefully as any clerk of the bank, cashier or counter-hopper, and hold your own in culture, manners, etiquette with the best of them.
Yes, it is the era of the working man, especially the working man who works with his hands, the specialist in hand work. It is the man of the trade. Put a large meaning into that word, trade. Exclude from it everything from the bargain counter, the commercialism for swapping money for goods, the calling of the merchant. For present purposes gather under the term all things done in machine shops, factories, mills, everything that is the result of the hammer, hatchet, saw, wheel, wire,