Cheaper by the Dozen

should last us for years."
    In justification to Dad, it should be said that automatic pencils always were used once the supply of wooden ones was exhausted. Dad simply couldn't stand seeing the wooden ones wasted.
    The next summer, when Dad was hired as a consultant by a washing machine company, we went through the same procedure with the washboard and hand-wringer at Nantucket. This time, though, Tom was prepared.
    "Wait a minute, Mr. Gilbreth," he said. "Before you bury my wringer I want to oil it good, so I can get the sand off it when we dig it up again."
    "That might not be a bad idea," Dad admitted. "After all," he added defensively, "I bought you a washing machine for Montclair. I can't have washing machines scattered all along the Atlantic seaboard, you know."
    "I didn't say nothing," said Tom. "I just said I wanted to oil my wringer good, that's all. I didn't say nothing about a washing machine for Nantucket." He started to mutter. "Efficiency. All I hear around this house is efficiency. I'd like to make one of them lectures about efficiency. The one best way to ruin a wringer is to bury the God-damned thing in the sand, and then dig it up again. That's motion study for you!"
    "What's that?" asked Dad. "Speak up if you have anything 1 'x to say, and if you haven't keep quiet."
    Tom continued muttering. "Motion study is burying a God-damned wringer in the sand and getting the parts all gummed up so that it breaks your back to turn it. That's motion study, as long as it's someone else's motions you're studying, and not your own. Lincoln freed the slaves. All but one. All but one."
    The pictures and writeups sometimes put us on the defensive in school and among our friends.
    "How come you write with a wooden pencil in school, when I saw in the newsreel how your father and all you kids buried a whole casket of them in a grave?"
    Sometimes, and this was worst of all, the teachers would read excerpts from writeups about the process charts in the bathroom, the language records, and the decisions of the the Family Council. We'd blush and squirm, and wish Dad had a nice job selling shoes somewhere, and that he had only one or two children, neither of whom was us.
    The most dangerous reporters, from our standpoint, were the women who came to interview Mother for human interest stories. Mother usually got Dad to sit in on such interviews, because she liked to be able to prove to him and us that she didn't say any of the things they attributed to her, or at least, not many of them.
    Dad derived considerable pleasure from reading these interviews aloud at the supper table, with exaggerated gestures and facial expressions that were supposed to be Mother's.
    "There sat Mrs. Gilbreth, surrounded by her brood, reading aloud a fairy tale," Dad would read. "The oldest, almost debutante Anne, wants to be a professional violinist. Ernestine intends to be a painter, Martha and Frank to follow in their father's footsteps."
    " ‘Tell me about your honorary degrees,' I asked this remarkable mother of twelve. A flush of crimson crept modestly to her cheeks, and she made a depreciating moue." Here Dad would stop long enough to give his version of a depreciating moue, and hide his face coyly behind an upraised elbow. He resumed reading:
    " ‘I am far more proud of my dozen husky, red-blooded American children than I am of my two dozen honorary degrees and my membership in the Czechoslovak Academy of Science,' Mrs. Gilbreth told me."
    "Mercy, Maud," Mother exploded. "I never said anything like that. You were there during that interview, Frank. Where did that woman get all that? If my mother should see that article, I don't know what she'd think of me. That woman never asked me about honorary degrees. And two dozen? No one ever had two dozen, unless it was poor Mr. Wilson. And I never said a thing about Czechoslovakia. And I hate and detest people who make depreciating moues. I never made one in my life, or at any rate not since I've been old enough to know better."
    Meanwhile, both Anne and Ern were near tears.
    "I can't go back to school tomorrow," Anne said. "How can I face the class after that business about the violin?"
    "How about me?" moaned Ern. "At least you own a violin and can make noises come out of it. ‘Ernestine wants to be a painter.' How could you tell her that, Mother? And my teacher is sure to read it out loud. She always does."
    "I didn't tell her that or anything else in the article," Mother insisted. "Where do