Page:Fighting blood (IA fightingblood00witw).pdf/17

 mind I wasn't going to spend the rest of my life behind no soda fountain. I didn't do all my dreaming at night and I was determined that some day I was going to mean something.

What brings me to Drew City, in the first place, is the Jersey Central Railroad and a desire to see Jack Reynolds, which jerks soda with me in Boston before he goes back to his home town, this village thirty-eight miles from New York where even the circus only stops for a day. Jack's real trade is being a advance agent for carnivals, and between seasons why, he puts on a white coat and apron and slings soda.

You'd be surprised at some of the fellows you run across in the soda-dispensing game. While I was in it, I worked side by side with actors, chorus men, song writers, press agents, scrappers, fellows working their ways through college, ex-bartenders, etc and etc., ail, except the ex-bartenders, waiting for something to turn up in their own line. You know in the big towns a first-class soda jerk can knock off eighteen to twenty bucks a week and a good head soda man which can also mix syrups can ask and get twenty-five to thirty. Plenty of milk-fed private secretaries and law clerks gets far less.

Aside from the fly-by-nights, which only goes behind a fountain while waiting for a chance to do their real trick, there's thousands of fellows has made a first-class trade out of jerking soda. And to get the important money you got to know a whole lot more about the calling than just being able to put on a white coat and apron and saying: "Get your checks