Cheaper by the Dozen

He went right on painting, as if he were paying no attention to us, but he didn't miss a word.
    "Lord, what awful puns," said Anne. "And this, I presume, is meant to fit into the category of 'things of great humor.' Listen to this one: 'Bee it ever so bumble there's no place like comb.' "
    "And we're stung," Ern moaned. "We're not going to be satisfied until we translate them all. I see dash-dot-dash-dot, and I hear myself repeating CARE-less CHILD-ren. What's this one say?"
    We figured it out: "When igorots is bliss, 'tis folly to be white." And another, by courtesy of Mr. Irvin S. Cobb, "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you may diet." And still another, which Mother made Dad paint out; "Two maggots were fighting in dead Ernest."
    "That one is Eskimo," said Mother. "I won't have it in my dining room, even in Morse code."
    All right, boss," Dad grinned sheepishly. "I'll paint over it. It's already served its purpose, anyway."
    Every day or so after that, Dad would leave a piece of paper, containing a Morse code message, on the dining room table. Translated, it might read something like this: "The first one who figures out this secret message should look in the right hand pocket of my linen knickers, hanging on a hook in my room. Daddy." Or: "Hurry up before someone beats you to it, and look in the bottom, left drawer of the sewing machine."
    In the knickers' pocket and in the drawer would be some sort of reward—a Hershey bar, a quarter, a receipt entitling the bearer to one chocolate ice cream soda at Coffin's Drug Store, payable by Dad on demand.
    Some of the Morse code notes were false alarms. "Hello, Live Bait This one is on the house. No reward. But there ' may be a reward next time. When you finish reading this, dash off like mad so the next fellow will think you are on some hot clue. Then he'll read it, too, and you won't be the only one who got fooled. Daddy."
    As Dad had planned, we all knew the Morse code fairly well within a few weeks. Well enough, in fact, so that we > could tap out messages to each other by bouncing the tip of a fork on a butter plate. When a dozen or so persons all I attempt to broadcast in this manner, and all of us preferred sending to receiving, the accumulation is loud and nerve-shattering. A present-day equivalent might be reproduced if the sound-effects man on Gangbusters and Walter Winchell should go on the air simultaneously, before a battery of powerful amplifiers.
    The wall-writing worked so well in teaching us the code that Dad decided to use the same system to teach us astronomy. His first step was to capture our interest, and he did this by fashioning a telescope from a camera tripod and a pair of binoculars. He'd tote the contraption out into the yard on clear nights, and look at the stars, while apparently ignoring us.
    We'd gather around and nudge him, and pull at his clothes, demanding that he let us look through the telescope.
    "Don't bother me," he'd say, with his nose stuck into the glasses. "Oh, my golly, I believe those two stars are going to collide! No. Awfully close, though. Now I've got to see what the Old Beetle's up to. What a star, what a star!"
    "Daddy, give us a turn," we'd insist. "Don't be a pig."
    Finally, with assumed reluctance, he agreed to let us look through the glasses. We could see the ring on Saturn, three moons on Jupiter, and the craters on our own moon. Dad's favorite star was Betelgeuse, the yellowish red "Old Beetle" in the Orion constellation. He took a personal interest in her, because some of his friends were collaborating in experiments to measure her diameter by Michelson's interferometer.
    When he finally was convinced he had interested us in astronomy, Dad started a new series of wall paintings dealings with stars. On one wall he made a scale drawing of the major planets, ranging from little Mercury, represented by a circle about as big as a marble, to Jupiter, as big as a basketball. On another, he showed the planets in relation to their distances from the sun, with Mercury the closest - and Neptune the farthest away—almost in the kitchen. Pluto still hadn't been discovered, which was just as well, because there really wasn't room for it.
    Dr. Harlow Shapley of Harvard gave Dad a hundred or more photographs of stars, nebulae and solar eclipses. Dad hung these on the wall, near the floor. He explained that if they were up any higher, at the conventional level for pictures, the smaller children wouldn't be able to see