Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/90

 CHAPTER XV

SHREDDED WHEAT BISCUIT

I had all but ruined my health by overwork, and I now went to California for a winter's rest. I rested a couple of months, and then wrote three one act plays. Having received a couple of thousand dollars from "The Money-changers," I decided to try out a plan which had haunted me for many years, that of establishing a Socialist theatrical enterprise. There were fifteen hundred Socialist locals throughout the United States, some of them large organizations. Would not they welcome a little travelling company, voicing the ideas which were barred from the commercial stage? I began to organize and rehearse such a company in San Francisco. And so came new adventures with the newspapers.

First, the famous Adventure of the Shredded Wheat Biscuit. It must be explained that I was trying queer ideas in diet; I have always been of an experimental temperament, and was willing to try anything in the hope of solving the health problem, which I have since realized is insoluble—there being no diet or system of any sort which will permit a man to overwork with impunity. In California I was living on raw food, and had written some articles about it in "Physical Culture." When I had to eat in San Francisco hotels I could not get raw food, of course, but at least I wanted whole wheat bread, or failing that, Shredded Wheat Biscuit. All of which, needless to say, was highly amusing to hotel proprietors and newspaper reporters.

I was staying at the St. Francis, and I ordered a meal in the restaurant, from a menu which specified "One Shredded Wheat Biscuit with cream, 25c; Two Shredded Wheat Biscuit with cream, 40c." I ordered One Shredded Wheat Biscuit, and after I had eaten it I wanted another, so I told the waiter to make it two. When I received the bill it showed fifty cents, and I pointed out to the waiter that this was an error, it should have been forty cents; I had had only one portion of cream. The waiter consulted and returned with the information that inasmuch as the order had been