Ring Lardner
Oakland Enquirer/January 9, 1919
(Answers to inquiries are based upon information which the Wake believes reliable, fair, and unprejudiced, but beyond the exercise of care in securing such information the Wake assumes no responsibility.)
To the Editor: How can I invest a dollar to obtain the best yield, the greatest margin pf safety and the most enjoyment? I have been advised to put it into eggs.
Bill Forman
While there would probably be some enjoyment and fair yield out of the sixteen eggs your dollar would buy at the market, the element of safety is lacking. Eggs are purely, and not always that, speculative. Moreover, you can’t enjoy your eggs and have them. To afford the owner pleasure, eggs must be used either as food or grenades. In either case, they’re gone.
This column does not question the motives of your previous adviser, but urges as the far better investment a dollar’s worth of Red X button.
Unlike the eggs, the button does not have to be eaten or thrown to be enjoyed, and unlike the eggs again, the button will stay with you a year without protest. Moreover, when you buy the button, you register your purchase and the fruits are yours even if you lose the button. If you lose the eggs they will not be returned to you unless the finder is insane and not then unless you have engraved your name and address on each and every egg.
As for yield, the button pays your initiation fee and a year’s dues in the largest club in the world. The saloon is supposed to be the poor man’s club, but the Wake knows of no saloon where a person remains a member in good standing at an annual expenditure of $1. In fact, the expenditure of less than that amount in a day usually results in the member’s name being posted and his jaw pasted. Besides which, the main idea in belonging to a club is that it entitles one to be spoken of as a prominent clubman when he is wed or dead, and in either case, the writer of the obituary generally mentions the name of the club which gives him the title. Well, neither the bride’s parents nor the pallbearers would object to having their names linked with that of a member of the Red X, but they might make an awful holler if they were spoken of in the same breath with a member of, say, the Workingman’s Exchange.
As for safety, this column can give ample assurance that the Red X will still be in existence at the end of a year, which is more than can be guaranteed for either an egg or a saloon.
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