'Onion King' Learns About Success From His Financial Failure
Balance Important To Pup in Lost Doll Trick
Clyde Melton Was Rated
In Half'Million Class;
7oif Runs Salvage Shop
By Herbert Arthur
"I HAD the world at my feet it seemed.
I "Then that world.went crashing all of a sudden.
I went to the bottom. But I learned plenty about
what we call success, fame, friends, and failure, in
these years down below.
"Now I am making ready for a comeback but
never again on the dizzy old scale!"
Clyde H. Melton speaking, the man who used to
be known as the
World's Bermuda
Onion King, when he
operated his huge
farm near San An
tonio, Texas.
The same man, yet
not the same man at
all. Tall, gray-haired,
keen-eyed with kindly
lines creased for
ready laughter
aquiline features
still a fine figure of a
man, he sits before
you in the bargain
basement of a little
salvage shop in Pasa
dena, Calif.
This is his king
dom now and for the
months until he can
riake ready his try to
recapture something
of the fortune once
his.
"But I don't want
to come up in a big
way, this time. I am willing to stay within limits,
to grow slowly, safely. If I hadn't been such a
plunger; if I hadn't put everything back in my
Clyde H. Melton
business and expended it to double size every year
but even then I might have been caught," he
catches himself, recollecting men he knew, big
business men, who saw him go down with a fierce
rush in the 1927-28 season, and who themselves
went down in the 1929 crisis.
MELTON'S i I fortune came before the depres
sion. First it was the weather. A sixty days'
rain spoiled, the young onion crop growing on his
4,600 acres of irrigated land.
Then, to top that blow and make it a knockout,
came money trouble. Two of the institutions he
banked with fell into difficulties that fatal season
And Melton lost out.
' That was the end of C. H. Melton, World's Larg
est Bermuda Onion Plant Grower (Trade Mark
Registered), with 15 growing stations, 15 shipping
stations; sidelines of cabbage, tomato, pepper,
sweet potato plants; pecan tree and rose bush nur
series., That was the end of the whole $3,500,000
institution, with its own printing equipment, its
system of "orders shipped the same day received,"
its seemingly unlimited possibilities.
But that was not the end of Melton.
IT was the beginning of a long, tough trail for him.
He settled for every dollar he owed, then went to
California.
In Pasadena, city of millionaires, sits Melton,
man whose name alone meant many millions. In
a. basement he sells reconditioned furniture, uten
sils, furnishings and gadgets, a piece or two at a
time. From his busy establishment in Devine,
Texas, he used to sell and ship as many as 100
freight cars a season, as many as one hundred mil
lion onion plants in a single day . . . and day after
day during a 100-day harvest season.
His customers were the leading jobbers and
brokers of the North American continent. His
customers now are the forgotten men and women,
who have to buy cheaply when they can buy. Mel
ton knows how to serve them and fill their orders,
too. He has been made manager of the store.
Before this, though, he made himself manager
of himself. He sees it that way.
That process was, he admits, difficult. Still think
ing in millions, he spurned propositions he would
welcome now. He found that old "friends" some-
Nfited Movie Dog Trainer Explains How Terrier Rags Was
Taught To Perform This Unusual Movie Stunt
Here l another article telling how Carl Spitz, noted
trainer of dogt for motion picture worki, teaches tricks.
These articles will appear regularly in this magazine.
Editor. .
RAGS, a light gray terrier with a keen, alert
mind, was hired to do the "doll trick" in the
picture, "Mrs. Wiggs in the Cabbage Patch." An
other terrier had attempted the trick, but had
shaken the stuffings out of the doll, instead.
Terriers like-to investigate things, it seems, and
Rags is no different from his brothers. Rags, how
ever, went to school and was educated so thor
oughly he seldom resorts to his primitive emotions,
although he would no doubt enjoy tearing a nice
rag doll to pieces.
In his doll trick, the dog was required to "find"
a "lost" doll and return it to its owner, little Vir
ginia Weidler, juvenile screen player.
Here again balance was of primary importance.
To achieve balance Rags was taught to sit down,
balance himself with his front paws up and ex
tended while he held the doll in his teeth.
The trick was not so complicated as some but it
required patience on the part of the trainer, Carl
Spitz, who went over the routine again and again
until Rags had it memorized.
When the cameras started grinding and the stunt
how failed to heed his plight. Only one stood by
him.
But he was the first man to prove that onions
could be most successfully grown from young green
plants already started from imported seed in his
nursery. That, with extensive advertising and
merchandising, put him in a position where his
credit rating hit the half -million mark.
And because of this, men who recall his pioneer
ing have been in touch with him. Next autumn he
believes he'll be on the way up again.
He is not giving up, nor giving in.
finished on the screen, few could tell but that Rags
had been finding dolls and returning them to their
owners all his doggoned life.
I
wmm
- I U fill
4 Mm
-Ws' I- -ft ti
(Tfk v If;
Here is Rags demonstrating his ability to find "lost"
dolls for Virginia Weidler, juvenile motion picture player.
Don
be
enjoyment
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2 Jackets of Cellophane) seal-in that
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lf?K ?&
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