Have You Tried These New Memory Courses?

Here Is the Story of How I Doubled My Salary in One Evening

ROBERT C. BENCHLEY

FIVE weeks ago I had such a bad memory that my friends all called me "Bad Memory Joe". There was practically nothing too important for me to forget. I would even forget how forgetful I was, and make dates which I should have remembered that I could never remember to keep. It was terrible.

I began to go down hill. Black spots would appear before my eyes, and then they would disappear and other black spots would take their place. My friends shunned me. Time and again I was on the point of calling up the doctor, but I could never remember his telephone number.

Then, one night, as I lay in bed trying to remember something (it didn't matter what, so long as I could remember it), I saw a great light. It flashed upon me like a dream. I leaped out of bed with a bound, and, landing on the toy train which my baby boy had left there the night before, I leaped back into bed again. But in that short fraction of a second, I had decided to take the step which was to mean so much in my life. I had decided to send for Prof. Womble's Memory Course (ten lessons in the privacy of your own room).

Well, I sent for the course—and studied it.

The effect was electrifying. Before I had read the first four paragraphs of the first lesson I was summoned to the telephone to answer a call from my office. At the conclusion of the conversation, I called my wife to me.

"Olga," I said, my voice quavering with emotion, "Olga, here is an extra fifty cents on this week's allowance. Mr. Golightly, my employer (as you know), has just called me up and told me that my salary has been raised fifty per cent. We can now afford that extra tire on our runabout."

And, at the moment when I closed the book containing the third lesson, I received a telegram saying that I had been elected VicePresident and General Manager of the company. This was too much. I kissed my wife and gave her another fifty cents.

To-day I am getting a salary of $150,000 a year—and extras. Five weeks ago I was getting $14 a week. And yet I do not consider myself any brighter than any other man. What I have done, you can do. Perhaps you would like to hear just how Professor Womble's Memory Course gave me the self-confidence that I now have. Whether you would like to hear it or not, you are going to.

The Secret for Remembering Names

LET us take, for instance, the matter of remembering names. Before taking this course I was utterly unable to connect names with faces, or vice versa. And, as the two almost always go together, it will be seen that I was not very well equipped for social congress. I have been known, while acting as an usher at a reception of honor, to be obliged to ask both the guest and the hostess what their names were, before I could perform the ceremony of introducing them to each other. This, of course, was gauche of me, and I felt it keenly.

But now, after studying the lesson on How to Remember Names and Faces, I am practically a new man. All I have to do is this:

Every day, before I leave my house, I memorize the names of sixty familiar household or barn-yard objects, making a mental picture of each one as I impress its name on the delicate surface of my brain. You have no idea how delicate and impressionable the surface of your brain is until you have taken this course. It makes one go hot and cold all over to think of the collection of scandalous impressions that must have accumulated there after thirty years of knocking about New York,—or Bangor, for that matter.

Thus, as I leave my front-door, I am muttering to myself: "Hen, bran-mash, sofa, silo, what-not, doggie, gas-stove-lighter, antimacassar, souvenir-ash-tray, camel, cat, percolator, egg-shell, etc., etc." And, as I say each name, I shut my eyes and picture it in my mind's eye: I sometimes fall down the front steps while walking thus with my eyes shut, but I certainly do visualize those hens and souvenirash-trays.

The Way the System Works

BY the time I reach my office, I have the sixty names of household and barn-yard objects pretty fairly well visualized. Then I tuck them away in a corner of my brain that has nothing in particular to do just at that moment, and wait for something to turn up.

Soon a customer of the firm comes in, bringing with him a friend from Tacoma who is interested in our little proposition with the North Star Smelting & Smelting Company. The friend is introduced as Mr. Conchman. He has a blonde, disorganized beard, of which I make immediate mental note. Then, just to make sure of myself and ostensibly to start the conversation pleasantly, I say:

"What was the name again, please? I didn't quite get it."

The repetition of the name gives me time to go through the following mental process, establishing a train of associations between this man and my list of barn-yard objects:

The man's beard is blonde and sparse. It might be said (if one were very anxious to say it) that it resembles ensilage. Ensilage is found in a silo, and silo, you will remember, is one of the list of sixty mystic words I memorized this morning. It was, in fact, fourth in the list. Next to it came what-not. Now, let us review the objects that are usually found on, a what-not. There may be a hand-painted china shepardess, a mother-of-pearl papercutter bearing a picture of a ferris-wheel and the legend "Greetings from the Centenary", a sweet-grass miniature demijohn, a conch-shell, —that's it,—a conch-shell, and the man's name is Conchman!

While you are evolving this train of associations, you can be shaking his hand up and down, unless the mental process should be too complicated, in which case you could motion him to be seated and give him a post-card album to look at until you got his name indelibly fixed on the delicate surface of your brain.

Then, when Mr. Conchman's business is transacted, he goes out and I go on with my work.

Let us say that it is seven years later, and that I meet him in a hotel in Mobile, Ala. Approaching me with a smile, he says:

"I don't suppose you remember me, do you?"

Quick as a wink I am on my feet.

"Why, of course, I remember you!" I say, delightedly, holding him off at arm's length in order to get a better perspective of all his characteristics. "Your beard reminds me of ensilage. Ensilage, ensilage, silo, silo, the fourth word in my list, the fifth of which is what-not. You're something that goes on a what-not. Yes, you are, you old rascal, don't deny it. What-not. Hand-painted china-shepardess? No . . . mother-of-pearl paper-cutter? No . . . sweetgrass demijohn ? It isn't Mr. Demi-john, is it? No, no, of course not. ... Wait, I've got it! It's Mr. Conch-shell! That's it, Conch-shell, or rather Conchman. How are you, Mr. Conchman? I remember you perfectly."

Sometimes, the man has gone before I can complete my train of associations, but usually I can hold his interest until I reach the end. And then I disclose to him that the secret of my remarkable memory is nothing more or less than Dr. Womble's Memory Course (ten lessons in the privacy of your own room).

This, of course, is just one branch of the course. Before I had finished reading lesson number eight I could remember numbers and dates with the same facility. This is done by somewhat the same method, only the numbers are personified and made to talk and act like human beings. There being only one hundred numbers that are used in ordinary combinations, one has to visualize only one hundred little men and women, doing one hundred differerent things. If, for instance, I want to remember that my watch number is 18,648,590 (just why anyone should ever want to remember his watch number is not clear, but it seems to be the thing to do, according to all diaries) I make the following little picture in my mind:

A fat little man wearing a suit of armor, piling three little Czecho-Slovaks into a basket of laundry which is being carried by a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of the Isadora Duncan dancers. You see. the principle of the thing? It is so simple as to be almost ludicrous, or perhaps, so ludicrous as to be almost simple.

Inspiration for Table Talk

THUS, in an ordinary conversation, I am able to supply interesting side-lights on the topics under discussion, which completely baffle the other parties to the affair. Let us say that I am attending a dinner-party. Turning to the lady on my right I say:

"Would you mind passing the salt, please? Salt is perhaps the chief product of Salzburg, Austria (latitude 45° 30"—longitude 10° 45") the mines in that district having produced, in the month of August, 1915, 12,000 tons of this precious saline formation. It has been estimated that no less than 120,000 people are given employment by this industry, and one pound of salt, in the bean, contains 4,500,000,000 grains, or as many grains as there were dollars in the Victory Loan."

I have acquired quite a reputation as a dinner-guest in this manner, and I can truthfully say that whatever I am, in a business or social way, I owe to Dr. Womble's Memory Course. What I have done, others can do.