Word went out from the warden’s office that each prisoner could write
but two letters a week. Eytinge had been dealing with forty retail
merchants. Many a man would have thrown up the sponge and quit. To have
thirty-eight customers taken away in that manner would have proved a
shock that few concerns would have been able to withstand. But Eytinge
did not admit defeat. He soon recovered from the shock and saw that
something must be done. Two letters must be made to do what forty had
been doing before.
The wholesale field was the only thing left. Eytinge began again
through that channel. And the letters he wrote! They were full of
business from the “Dear Sirs” to the “Yours Very Truly.” These letters
did not whine. Eytinge did not have the time nor space for that. He had
to talk business, and he talked it so well that it was not long until
the two letters were doing all that the forty had ever done.
In the meantime a new administration had taken hold of affairs in
Arizona. The State prison was removed from the banks of the Colorado up
the Gila Valley to Florence, and with this change came a change for the
better in Eytinge’s health. When he entered the penitentiary at Yuma
he weighed 119 pounds and now he weighs 190 pounds, is the picture of
health and physicians declare that he is cured of tuberculosis.
Finding himself had given Eytinge two things. It gave him a new self,
one of which he was as ignorant of as you or I, and it also gave him
health. The necessity for money with which to fight off death had done
this and it had been his desire for money that had placed him in a
position where he had to get it by some other means than by placing
some one else’s name on a check.
By this time Eytinge’s letters had begun to attract the attention of
people other than those with whom he was dealing. He had become a
student of criminology also, and when Governor George P. Hunt, the
first Statehood governor of Arizona, began his fight for better penal
laws after his inauguration in February, 1912, Eytinge had published
a booklet of which he was the author, dealing with this question. A
noted sociologist has pronounced this to be the cleverest thing ever
published on the question.
Magazines soon began to find Eytinge a man worth telling their readers
about. Advertising booklets such as “Letters,” published in Chicago;
“Printers Ink,” and others sent men to Arizona to “write Eytinge up.”
In this way he became well known to men who held high positions in the
advertising field. His advice was sought by business houses whose sales
forces needed bolstering up, and he has also been offered numerous
positions as business manager and business counsel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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