A Longing 13 Good Signs 14 Advertising 15 Going After Them 16 Suggestion 16 The Pioneers 17 October Days 18 Housing the Help 19 Classy Homes 20 Necessary Goods 21 The Mixer 21 Stairways 22 All the Time 23 Houses Scarce 24 Floors 25 Doors 25 Building a House 26 The Gladsome Spiel 27 Personality 28 Planting the Tree 29 The Shoppers 29 The New Year 30 Walt Mason --Everybody’s Poet Walt Mason is a poet and the world knows it. He is read by more people than any other living writer. His prose rhymes are published in 200 daily newspapers with an aggregate circulation of about 12 millions. Walt says his only claim on the nation’s gratitude is that he does not go about the country reading from his “works.” Indeed, he doesn’t have to, for his writings are read with avidity by hosts of people. Walt Mason lives in Emporia, Kansas, most of the time, but spends his summers in Estes Park, Colorado. He does nothing but write prose rhymes. And at this job he is one of the hardest working men living. He is probably the only poet who makes his living solely by the sweat of his brow. Many people have wondered what Walt Mason gets for his contributions to CURTIS SERVICE. This is rather a personal question but it is sufficient to say that he gets enough money from work of this kind so that his monthly income has totalled as high as $875.00. At any rate, this was the figure he gave out in an interview in a Kansas City paper in 1914, and like everything else, prose rhymes weren’t as high then as they are now. As Mr. Mason himself explains, he was never a lumber dealer, though he has tried to sell everything from hardware to hogs. How, then, can he write lumber lyrics that hit such a responsive chord in every lumber dealer’s mind? The Lord knows. He was born that way. His prose rhymes “get under your hide” and under every other lumber dealer’s hide, because Walt Mason has an interest in you and your fellow human beings. Walt Mason was born in Columbus, Ontario, May 4th, 1862. He was the fifth of six sons of poor parents. When Walt was four years old his father was accidentally killed. After his mother died, when he was fifteen, he went to Port Hope, Ontario, and worked in a hardware store for $2.50 a week, boarding himself. He soon forsook the hardware business, in 1880, and crossed Lake Ontario into New York State, where he hoed beans until he decided that there wasn’t any sense in hoeing beans.