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rest of the house was filled with cots occupied by an assortment of male roomers, and the solitary bathroom in the place had to be shared with them. It was a place to stay, at least, and Ethel, bless her soul, didn’t complain. Not at first. But it became increasingly difficult for her when her sister got an apartment of her own, a job as a secretary, and went her own way. I got a job with W. F. Morang & Son selling real estate for a development in Fort Lauderdale along Las Olas Boulevard. It was amazing. Everything I had been hearing about the real estate boom was true. The company had twenty seven-passenger Hudson automobiles. If you got into the top twenty bracket in sales with them, you were given a Hudson and a driver for business use. That was for me, of course, and I made it quickly. I went to the Miami Chamber of Commerce and looked up the names of tourists who came from the Chicago area. I’d call them and fill them in—as one Chicagoan to another—on an exciting development I’d found in this palmy land of crazed speculation. They were all intrigued. I would take them by car up route AlA to Fort Lauderdale so they could see for themselves what was going on there along the “new river,” the intercoastal waterway. The property was underwater, but there was a solid bed of coral rock beneath, and the dredging for the intercoastal raised all the lots high and dry, with permanent abutments. People who purchased those lots really got a bargain, even though the prices were astronomical for those times, because the area is now one of the most beautiful in all of Florida, and lots there are worth many times what they sold for then.
    My job was to line up the prospects and get them to the property. There they would be taken on a tour of the development by a man we called the “spieler.” We would follow along with them, and if we saw a couple begin to get glassy-eyed and ripe for the collar, we would signal another specialist who tagged along—the “closer.” This gentleman would move in, and we would separate the marked couple from the rest of the herd and go to work on them. All it took to purchase one of these pieces of paradise was a $500 deposit. I got a number of deposits each trip. The people I was dealing with were mostly older folks. I felt that my twenty-three-year-old face was too callow to be credible for a real estate wheeler-dealer, so I decided to grow a mustache. It was a disaster. Most men have a margin around their lips, a demarcation where hair doesn’t grow. I lack this feature, with the result that my mustache grew right down into my mouth. Moreover, it was a horrible brownish-red color. Ethel despised it, and I didn’t like it much either. I didn’t have to wear it long. The muckraking stories in northern newspapers soon pulled the plug on our big real estate boom, and there were no longer any prospects to worry about. What a colossal blow! Just when I was getting into the swing of selling these lots, the whole business vanished.
    One morning I was sitting in the living room we all shared in our rooming house, noodling around on the decrepit old upright piano, and wondering what in the hell I was going to do next. I was seriously considering going back to Chicago and asking to get back on at the radio station and at the Lily Cup Company. My thoughts were so far away that at first I didn’t notice the chap calling to me through the screen door. Finally I let him in, and he wanted to know if I’d like a job playing the piano.
    â€œIs the Pope Catholic?” I replied.
    He wanted to know if I had a tuxedo. I didn’t, of course, but he allowed that a dark blue suit would do. That I had; and I could pick up a black bow tie on the way home from the union hall if they accepted my Chicago Musician’s Union card and gave me a permit to play in Miami. I had to do some sight-reading for the union tester, and then he asked me to play a