motion pictures well i believe in motion pictures but the motion pictures i believe are the motion pictures in people's minds and the motion picture as we turn that is the cinema is merely a means of putting motion pictures in people's minds now there many more economical and faster ways of inducing pictures in people's minds than by means of motion pictures motion pictures may be a bit more vivid and may be more specific they may be more stimulating from an emotional standpoint they may be more realistic but if you're dealing with familiar situations and you can talk in terms of the previous experience of the people to whom you are talking and can make that sufficiently vivid by still pictures or even by words without pictures it's far more economical of course so that only about a third of our work is in motion picture field the rest is verbal in terms of talks illustrative talks yes and dramatic productions of one kind or another we produce live shows and in fact we are at times the largest employers of the theatrical help should we say in the country because we at times we have as many as fourteen roadshows out at one time i wonder if i may ask you to do something for me mr handy you on your garment have no outer pocket and i'm familiar with why you have your suit tailored without it but i think it's an interesting story and i'd like you to share it with our audience i don't think i'm peculiar in this but well let's put it temptation is hard to resist at least i find it so and when i had a pocket there i was inclined to put things in it it's the easiest pocket to reach with my right hand like that so i had a way of putting things there and they interfered with what i'm most interested in which is maintaining attention and keeping interest on the thing that you're talking about in other words the concentration on communication whereas i might be watching your pencils instead of listening carefully and watching you right and i had particular weakness because i used to on a blackboard or on a chart as we call it these turnover charts i would use green and red and black and sometimes a fourth color to emphasize or give special significance to particular points that i was making sometimes those are symbolic such as green for something good to do and red for go slow a danger sign and that sort of thing well the convenient place to have those pencils so they didn't slow me down in the flow of my conversation or my presentation or communication was in this pocket and they would take attention when i didn't want them to take attention so to remove temptation i had all my suits thereafter made without that pocket i suppose for similar reasons i have come to learn of certain wardrobe do's and don'ts that your freelance actors and performers and so forth are asked to cooperate with in handy productions such as i believe one time the button down collar was taboo i think you discouraged the use of the bow tie when it perhaps was not widely worn and at one time i think you would have preferred an actor without a mustache rather than with one am i right jam yes and that is all based on the same idea it's difficult to keep your own attention on what you're talking about and stick to the subject let alone to have your hearers stick to it and anything that is conspicuous now there may come a time again when smooth faces or upper lips are conspicuous but that particular time mustaches were conspicuous and they were distracting so far as the wardrobe was concerned we do recommend to speakers executives if they have a communication job we suggest that they have a tie that be not conspicuous sometimes it's conspicuous to have a tie the same color as your suit in fact i think we're pretty close to that time now yes i had a fancy at the time personally for silk ties i had quite a collection and variety of them i had the experience of talking to a sales executive and presenting to him what i thought was a very good recommendation a suggestion for the solution to the problem and what i got through he said to me he said jam i was on a first name acquaintance with him well i think i may say it was no less than tom watson sr of the ibm oh he said jam would you mind starting all over again i have been so interested in that beautiful tie that you're wearing that i haven't heard a word you said well i decided i would leave my colorful ties at home that was the end of your silk collection i had a sofa cushion made out of them mr handy i'm very much interested in something too that you were obviously a pioneer in and that was the documentary film and i know of your attraction to the kind of man that tom edison was and i recall that you had a great deal to do with the presentation of one of the early documentary films on his life didn't you sir yes i learned a great deal from tom edison i wrote a paid story on him one of a series of interviews that i had with the business leaders and outstanding personalities at that time particularly inventors people of new ideas while really following up some of these suppressed desires that i'd had at my father's family table when i was an infant i sold the tribune on letting me do a series of that kind in which i could ask the questions i didn't tell them that that i hadn't been allowed to ask when i was six seven eight and nine and ten from that standpoint well sure so in interviewing tom edison i had learned a good deal and i wanted a third helping i went down to find out what he then considered his greatest invention and after showing off my previous knowledge i discovered that it wasn't at all what i thought that instead of it being the motion picture or the phonograph or the electric light bulb that he thought his greatest invention was the central service station from which an entire community or city could draw power electrical current well i had dug up a lot of other things that were surprising and among them was his concept of the motion picture and i discovered that he had originally intended that invention to be as an educational tool and that he had envisioned a transformation in our schools and he was living without that realization of his dream and the suffering is from the disappointment of seeing it being used for entertainment which at that time well times haven't changed too much was devoted almost exclusively to love murder mystery crime and sex that isn't crime exactly that sort of thing and he was disappointed so i immediately then thought well i wonder if i couldn't save this daughter of yours from the life of shame under which the motion picture industry has led her and the perils of pauline and all that sort of thing and why not have some factual films one of the earliest was a documentary a life of thomas edison and as a matter of fact in the silent days wasn't pancho villa another of your subjects there yes pursuing factual films and looking for some excitements in it and using the tribune to promote them on a participation or rentals basis we sent a correspondent down there to talk to pancho villa and to get the inside story from him on why he should behave the way he was behaving how he got that way and talked to him sympathetically and he allowed us to take motion pictures we brought them in and we circulated them in the theaters and that way broke new ground we at that time however had already pioneered the celic tribune news news weekly which was a presentation of factual material in the theaters with the pressure of newspaper publicity we had demonstrated that people were also interested in the facts of life as well as the facts of life as they quote unquote yes unquote presented them mr handy you have during your very very interesting and colorful and productive years in this business done so many things i'd like to ask a question that i mean not to be a provocative one necessarily but if you and i were to meet on a train or today possibly in a jet airplane and we got to chatting and i said to you mr handy what do you do how would you describe your occupation well you might have something entirely new and i might hear something entirely new i suppose i'm along that line once it is a bit difficult business to describe because we set out to accelerate the processes of education and we interpret that term very broadly and also to make them more pleasant i always loved to learn but i hated to study and i thought there might be a lot of other people who felt the same way so i could describe our business in terms of well i could just use that phrase what we do is accelerate education but chances are i'd get some more questions i've discovered that or i might say our job is to make education painless that also has the disadvantage of being an interesting statement that leads to another question it is an interesting statement because a number of years ago you made one very close to that i think when you said that education should be a pleasure and not a pain in the head pain in the head and it can even become a pain at the neck if you let that headache continue long enough that's as a matter of fact well i once gave myself the challenge of stating that differently every time this question of mine you mean yes your question what's your business and giving a different answer each time at the same time see that that answer was explicit that it was true and that it was succinct and for a whole year i stuck to that resolution every time i had a seatmate on a plane i travel fly about seventy five thousand miles a year have for well i suppose thirty years i would give a different answer to that question i even made the game harder for myself by always asking my seatmate what's his business so that he would have to ask me and you know that for that entire year and i suppose i must have answered the question at least one hundred and eighty times in the three hundred and sixty days that i was moving around on trains and planes i gave a different answer every time and it was a true answer of course that i'm not surprised by each time mr handy there are so many interesting facets that i want to be sure we at least touch on this afternoon and you pointed out earlier that you came from a family of seven and of course i know that mr jamison handy has a family of his own but i don't know what his number is and what these people do and i'd like to hear a little bit about them well i have five of them and none of them are in my business one of my daughters earns some extra money by teaching in a class elementary school i have another son who is a business executive he's been a salesman and a sales manager i have one who has no use for business he thinks it's a pain in the neck i have a daughter who has given me grandchildren wonderful and in matter of fact a greatgrandson you were away from home as you pointed out so much that i'm told that mrs handy has made up for some of the lost time when you didn't go back to the university of michigan and has a kind of hobby of her own of going to school well she likes continuing education and i think i finally sold her on education maybe maybe i didn't you know women sell themselves sometimes and let you think you contributed to their education sincerely and maybe i have a little bit hope so but about ten years ago she started going to college she's slightly my junior but not very much and she's been going college ever since although she's earned a sabbatical holiday and she's not going to college this semester but she's gone to a number of colleges i am away from home but she will come and stay with me as a commitment she always keeps it any time i stay in the same place we stay in the same place for two weeks that seldom happens i'm gonna be in detroit all this week but that puts her up pretty well in the clear on the other hand that interrupts her education she went to summer school at columbia one year and i think it was about an eightweek term and i complicated things by staying here for a couple of weeks so out of the eight weeks she missed two but she succeeded in getting an a i'm quite proud of that i would be indeed on a condensed or fast course mr handy a while ago when you were relating how you did a little fast crosscountry work to get your story to the tribune on the occasion of the demonstration at the university of michigan running downtown to the telegraph office yes i related this hour with another sport in which you have participated with outstanding success and i'd like to talk about your swimming i'm especially anxious too because if i may and i'd like to read a little bit that was printed in the illinois athletic club tricolor on its 45th anniversary when commander francis mcdermott wrote as follows in august of one thousand nine hundred and seven our tank opened and among the swimmers we had harry hepner perry mcgilvery and jamison handy only one of them had a reputation at that time handy he was truly a one man team he's the only man in the history of swimming and any aau association to hold every championship fifty yards one hundred yards two hundred and twenty four hundred and forty eight hundred and eighty and the mile one hundred and fifty yard backstroke and two hundred yards breaststroke he held the central association championship both indoor and outdoor for several years and you're still going at it strong in the swimming department aren't you jam well i still swim daily five or six hundred yards i like to pull water around and work my body through it well you're not likely to volunteer this information so i want to tell if i may this myself that mr jamison handy was elected to the swimming hall of fame just last year in one thousand nine hundred and sixty and you were the 23rd to achieve that distinction again i congratulate you well that was most largely for my contribution in devising new techniques in swimming as a matter of fact it's a mistake to think of me as an athlete because i won my championships and broke my records largely with my head the head is quite important in swimming and one of the techniques which i have advocated is using the head physically in swimming more as the fish and the porpoises do and we're getting pretty good acceptance of that although we still have a way to do but my records and the versatility to which you apply there due to the fact that i got pushed around the minute i would develop a new technique and break the records some of these longeared fish whose hands were farther from their heads when they're stretched out that is when visualizing the end you start with your feet and you touch with your hands they took those records away so i had to move into another territory and make another change so i went from one device to another that's how i happened to get into breaststroke was all based on notions we used in the breaststroke then a side kick like this where these muscles aren't as strong they don't get as much practice as you're running so i just came to kick pool that way in both directions they were using in the backstroke they were using both arms together this way i used them one at the time like that and that way avoided the loss of momentum and broke the records but in swimming as these talented longeared fish particularly the basketball potential shall we say started to use those techniques they broke my records many of them didn't stay on the books more than a year well i think one remarkable achievement that robert ripley had occasionally publicized as a matter of fact of course it's well known i think that you were a member of the us olympic swimming team when you were quite a young man when was that mr handy one thousand nine hundred and four and you were then in what event i was in the quartermile breaststroke and in the halfmile and in the mile now it was not on that subject that mr ripley found it so unusual and therefore reported it what was more amazing is that twenty years later you were again representing the united states on the olympic team well i represented the second time i represented america as one of the brokendown swimmers you know what the brokendown swimmers are i'm afraid not they're the water polo players oh so the second time i went back with the water polo players and that was partly the realization of a suppressed desire because i had been selected for the one thousand nine hundred and eight team but my employers thought i'd made all the contribution i should make at that time and i didn't get a chance to go with that disappointment i wanted to find some way in they wanted you to show up i got just ahead of somebody who has duplicated my record at least technically by making the team twenty eight years apart as a yaughtsman very interesting mr handy there was something else that i wanted to ask you and you say you travel so much and swim daily i want to know why swimming attracts you well from the standpoint of efficiency i use every part of my body which is difficult to do without a hockey team or a basketball squad for these days and it's something that you can do alone although it's fun to do with other people when i can get all the activity i want get my arteries all flushed out use every finger that i have and every hole get a lot of action in a short time and i can do that in ten minutes and if i have company so much the better but i don't have to make an appointment to do it and i can do it when i get off an airplane at one thousand one hundred at night or at five hundred in the morning if necessary so i carry a swimming suit with me i was gonna tell you it'd be safe guess to assume that you have a quantitatively adequate wardrobe of swimming suits well i have a few i have a light one one that i can put in a match box fits very nicely in my bag i carry a bag nowadays